[DRAFT] Education, Creativity, and Orthodoxy

Discuss the disagreements between my professors on education's and creativity. My thesis is that school does not destroy creativity but rather incubates orthodoxies. In particular, discuss how the classroom exercise that sparked this disagreement illustrates my point.

• the classroom exercise

  • I forget the exact problem, but the most elegant solution required ternary reasoning
  • most students sought binary solutions, which either failed or were clunky
• DA's takeaway

  • school destroys creativity
  • focusing on binary reasoning in CS curriculum hampered students' ability to recognize the ideal ternary solution
• JP's counterargument

  • the students were in fact displaying great creativity in their attempts to solve the problem
  • it was unfair of DA to not recognize that
  • wasn't meant as a brutal takedown of DA; their refutation was an aside in a speech championing the creativity of their students
• my point

  • education does not destroy creativity but instead incubates orthodoxy
  • yes, the students' focus on binary solutions was the result of 4+ years of CS study
  • it isn't that school explicitly hampers the ability to think outside the box, but it does often provide us with new boxes
  • how would a non-CS student have approached the problem? if they sought a non-binary solution, would that have necessarily meant they were more creative than the CS students?
  • no; their advantage would have been that they didn't have the same boxes (frames of reference) as the CS students
  • creativity involves knowing where those boxes are drawn and consciously searching outside them when necessary