Developing Creativity and Imagination by Accumulating Lots of Useless Knowledge

Abstract

Human experience in early childhood involves emotional vividness, openness to experience, and imaginative fertility. Children are then given into the care of school systems that were designed for an industrial age, and these systems, despite the heroic efforts of many teachers and administrators within them, tend to impose literalness, homogeneity, accumulation of much irrelevant knowledge, and desiccated forms of rationalism, which at least discourage and often stifle effective learning, imaginative engagement, and creativity.