I decided I was only going to do things for the fun of it and only that afternoon as I was taking lunch some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria. There was a blue medallion on the plate - the Cornell sign. As the plate came down it wobbled. It seemed to me that the blue thing went round faster than the wobble and I wondered what the relationship was between the two - I was just playing; no importance at all. So I played around with the equations of motion of rotating things and I found out that if the wobble is small the blue thing goes round twice as fast as the wobble. I tried to figure out why that was, just for the fun of it, and this led me to the similar problems in the spin of an electron and that led me back into quantum electrodynamics which is the problem I’d been working on. I continued to play with it in this relaxed fashion and it was like letting a cork out of a bottle. Everything just poured out and in very short order I worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize.
Richard Feynmann, Nobel Prizewinning Physicist
Above is an excerpt from Feynmann connecting the dots and how he continues to wonder through adulthood. Contrary to people's beliefs, creativity is found only in the Arts. Instead of dedicating it to a discipline, think of it as a behaviour or mindset. To find out more, read a report on Creativity, Culture and Education here.
Sir Ken Robinson speaks about education and creativity. His book Creative Schools expands on the above talk. While some of the ideas are not seemingly applicable immediately, they make a lot of sense as ideas for incubation. If you are also curious about why policies are peppered with rhetoric like innovation, entrepreneurship, 21st century skills then you might be interested in watching the videos or reading the books. He's a very humorous speaker and definitely not a dull moment!
A thought-provoking statement is when Robinson says that
"as children grow up, we start educating them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads and slightly to one side..."He went further to speak about the hierarchy of subjects and within the arts, visual arts and music are usually given higher priority than drama and dance.
