Stephen Downes

This article is a response to Ken Robinson's now 17-year-old argument that schools kill creativity. The response: "Creativity only occurs with a firm understanding of a specific domain of knowledge and schools should situate that foundation of knowledge as a central pillar." Blake Harvard uses car engines as an example. "To truly design a creative and more fuel efficient car engine, I need an incredibly vast foundation of knowledge on car engines and fueling." Maybe - or, on the other hand, you could design an electric engine with no knowledge of fueling whatsoever. And that is the truism widely observed: the deeper one is immersed into one approach to things, the harder it becomes to imagine a creative alternative. What's most useful - to my mind - is partial knowledge. Enough to trigger pattern recognition, but not so much to cause overfitting to one specific approach.