What Stifles Innovation?

Late 1940s. South Vietnam. The Viet Cong have begun to infiltrate the South, building an underground labyrinth of tunnels, essentially building a city's worth of transport links. They have done this to transport vital resources across the country, in an effort to oust the French colonialists. This network of subterranean tunnels will prove useful in a decade or so. The communists have built, without the help of a large corporate investor, or a corrupt foreign government, a tool perfectly designed to crush the American forces, in support of the non-communist South Vietnam. The Cu Chi Tunnels lay beneath Vietnam, North and South. Tens of thousands of miles of tunnels were built to aid the resistance against the American capitalists.

A brief study of the Viet Cong leads us to the conclusion that formal education is not necessary to lead a nation. There were some formally educated leaders of the Viet Cong, including lawyers like Nguyễn Hữu Thọ, But there were also many influential leaders of the Viet Cong that left school at the age of 14. If we consider that the architects of the resistance against the Americans, those in possession of the genius that led to the construction of the tunnels, were men who stopped formal education, aged just 14, we realise that formal education is not necessary to prove one's intellectual discipline.

If we also consider the general public rarely support leaders less formally educated than themselves, we reach the conclusion that the men "on the ground", the common men who put their hands to the ploughs must have had just a primary education, or none at all. Therefore, we can conclude that formal education is not required to foster the spirit of ingenuity and creativity. But is there any evidence to suggest that the school system discourages creativity?

Children are naturally inquisitive; children want to know. This is commonly known, and commonly accepted. But another objective truth is that children are curious about different things, and in different ways. Some will want to know how trees grow, or why leaves fall. Others will want to know how to play the violin. However, school assumes a lack of variation. The system of formal education that we currently have punishes students for specialising in areas in which they have a notable interest or aptitude. 

When we complain about this, we are told that the purposes of an education is to make us well-rounded individuals. This is an extremely dangerous answer because it stifles innovation. The majority of major contributions to the sciences and arts were made by people who exclusively focused on becoming specialists in particular fields. Galileo produced no major work of literature; but Shakespeare made no major discovery in astronomy or physics. When schools tell us that they want us to be well-rounded, they essentially tell us that it isn't important for they are actively killing the next generation of scholars and artists. 

However, this should be expected. A body that benefits from your ignorance will attempt to actively hinder your chances of becoming informed. A body that requires you to be docile in order to control you will aim to stop you from thinking dynamically.

Although the Viet Cong's motivation (to establish a communist state) is not one I endorse, I believe that their creativity was admirable, and that it was the product of not being fed information by a committee of bureaucrats. We should encourage students to pursue areas of aptitude instead of putting them onto conveyor belts and stifling innovation.