Education and Training
Education and training are often underestimated for creativity. We often think of education as something that stifles creative thought, new ideas. Something that inhibits thinking for oneself while placing an insanely high emphasize on learning facts that are already known. But education is not only the formal education in schools (and not all schools or teachers are bad), but also the learning of knowledge and skills for oneself. And while training often sounds repetitive and boring, it is necessary to build up the knowledge (facts) and the skills needed to do creative work on a high technical level.
Knowledge
One of the most famous quotations by Albert Einstein deals with imagination and knowledge:
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
A nice quotation, is it not? It seems to suggest that you do not need knowledge if you just have imagination. Unfortunately this is not true. While there is a downside to knowledge, especially if it comes to expertise and the assumptions experts make (which save time but may lead them to overlook crucial details for innovation), knowledge is a necessary prerequisite to being creative. You can not have implementable ideas if you do not understand the subject. Consider the discovery of the “Benzene Ring” by Kekulé: He had a dream of a snake biting its tail which lead him to consider the form of a ring. Sudden insight after some time of incubation? Yes. Was knowledge unnecessary? No. He had a vast knowledge about chemistry, he thought about this problem long and hard with the relevant knowledge in mind. Yes, he gave his mind the time to relax and work out the idea, but he put a lot of effort in learning what there was to learn about it in the first place.
So there is no way but to hit the books and get a lot of experience, before you can expect to have good ideas in a given subject. C. D. Jackson probably said it better with “Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.”. Without knowledge and experience you might lack the assumptions that can keep experts on conservative trains of thought but the most you can do is reinvent the wheel if you are able to invent anything.
Most of the winners of the German “future prize” emphasized the importance of knowledge and education for creativity. Root knowledge, pure memorization of knowledge, is considered of little worth — most wanted to understand the subject, to really see the borders of the knowledge, the frizzy ends, the conditions when something works and when it does not. Education should provide the basis, but it should be interdisciplinary — the is no worth in producing a fachidiot (german word for “idiot of your own subject”). Another important factor is experience — education and pure book knowledge is not sufficient for great ideas.
But they also stress that while acquiring knowledge, one must not loose once imagination. So maybe Einstein had a point after all: Imagination is important, but only if you also have the relevant and vast knowledge that constructs your inner world in which you can imagine things.
Skills
My teacher in German once said that anybody could draw like Piet Mondrian: “Simply make a composition with yellow, blue, and red, hell. Hell, he even named that damn thing that way.” Maybe he was right and surely now people can copy his work, but even when the idea is there to be copied, you have to develop the skills first. Every artist spends thousands of hours of learning his tools, be it a musician with his guitar, a painter with his oil colors, or a photographer with his camera. The same is necessary for scientists who have to learn how to conduct experiments, the methodology and methods, the scientific thinking. It is not only book learning but a lot of practical experience until one becomes an expert in his domain. And this learning of skills often distinguishes between “a nice painting” and “a work of art”.
Book Navigation
Recent Comments