70 SCIENTIST 



of our regular education. It appears to be true that many 

 unusually creative people in both engineering and the fine 

 arts have had rather spotty and unconventional education. 

 But the other side of this proposition is not so convincing. 

 There are many, many people with spotty and unconven- 

 tional education who are not unusually creative. There is 

 enough worry about the possibly depressing effects of some 

 of our present methods of education, however, to have stim- 

 ulated active changes in science and engineering courses, 

 especially at the secondary school and college levels. These 

 will be dealt with in a later chapter. 



It may not be too difficult to remove much of the inhibi- 

 tory effect of education. It is quite another thing to take 

 a positive approach and design a curriculum and teaching 

 materials for the production of creative genius. In fact 

 nobody has seriously tried to do so, since we know so 

 little about what creative genius is. In the field of pure 

 science it is usual to find that the most creative people have 

 had a good standard education. Frequently they have gone 

 on to occupy a series of academic posts. The creative engi- 

 neer, at least until very recently, has tended to have some- 

 what less formal education. Edison's formal schooling, for 

 example, was limited to three months. By far the most 

 creative engineer I have personally known left college in 

 his freshman year and didn't return until some years after 

 he had produced his first major invention. These observa- 

 tions lead us to the conclusion that education has relatively 

 little to do with the initiation or cultivation of creativity as 

 such, although it probably is important in shaping the form 

 which the expression of creativity may assume. 



The greater academic interests and affihations of the 

 scientist are probably related to the fact that his principal 

 product is a set of statements about the nature of things. 

 He must, therefore, have more than the usual interest in 



