Sir Ken brilliantly describes the problem. The schools we have today don’t always do a good job of fostering creativity. Our schools were designed a hundred years ago, when most workers would take factory jobs that valued consistency, standardization, and subservience to authority. These schools teach students how to follow instructions to the letter, and how to get the right answer — what psychologists call “convergent thinking”. This means that the most successful students are the ones who do the best job of avoiding mistakes. And yet, creativity researchers have demonstrated that mistakes and dead ends are essential to the creative process. Creativity emerges when people generate many different possible answers rather than rushing to the one right answer.

Schools That Foster Creativity by Dr. R. Keith Sawyer