Education: The death of innovation?

I recall a time when i was sitting in my CATS(creative applied thinking skills for those who do not know) class when i was thinking about what was i actually trying to learn there. Well, the answer is pretty simple, it is to teach me how to think creatively as the module name states. The tutor shows us a number of ways for us to think creatively, and expects us to apply these thinking skills to our everyday lives. Fair enough, but my question is: Isn't telling us how we should think a form of restriction to the many other ways in which we can think creatively? Which leads me to question education as a whole, is the true purpose of education really to educate, or is it there to dumb us down, to restrict the number of different ways we can view the world, or interpret our experiences?

Firstly, the basis of all education - Spoken and written language. Spoken and written language serves as an ease of communication between people. The basics of spoken and written language involve identifying labelled objects, for example, an apple is well, an apple. By giving labels to objects, we are restricting our imagination, for example, you can't think of an apple as anything else but an apple. Another flaw is when we reduce beautiful things to just a mere objects by just labelling them. A person who makes the decision to murder someone else reduces the victim to a person, but the victim could be your close friend or family.In fact, in the last sentence, the term 'someone else' is already a form of reduction, as 'someone else' implies not yourself, or someone you are not familiar with. On paper, the victim is just a casualty figure, nobody knew him, so nobody cares, after all, he is just another person, but for the people that actually knew him, he is so much more than that. Little wonder why the world is such a cold place to live in. You might wonder now, well if we avoid spoken and written language then how are we going to communicate? There's body language, the language that we naturally knew, the language we did not have to be taught. Most of the communications between people are done subconsciously, through body language, rather than spoken language, after all, actions speak louder then words.

Secondly, science. Simply put, science seeks to explain nature in physical terms. To me, science is just another religion, the only difference is that religion seeks to explain nature in spritual terms. People widely believe that science is the model of truth. In scientific terms, theories are proven or disproven by conducting experiments. If the experiments give the same results as interpreted by our senses every single time we did it, then the theory is considered true. This scientific method has been our concept of truth. Applying the concept to our lives, if nobody else has sensed us, then we never existed. Is this why we humans have this desire to enforce our existence on other people through social status and power? The phrase: "My family is my life." or "My friends are my life" comes to mind, without other people, our very existence would have been denied by the scientific method. But some of you might say: "We only learned science in primary 3!" , true, but our parents have been enforcing this concept of truth since we were babies. Science gives rise to a new breed of people called skeptics, using the scientific method of thinking, are unable to conceive that of which they have not sensed before, as their imagination is now limited to which science defines as true.

Is there another concept of truth? Of course there is, that is through your intuition. Something is an intuition when it really seems to be true, but you cannot give a reason as to why it is so. Our intuitions are our instincts, our gut instincts. Sometimes it's better to trust your intuition, because if you do not trust yourself, who else can u trust?

These assertions might be too big a generalization to make and there's no way i can prove this to be true, at least not by the scientific method, but my intuition tells me so. This post is just food for thought, to look at education in a different way. Next time you think of an uneducated person, do not think of him as a brute just because he acts and thinks differently, rather, think of him as being innocent and able to form his own ideas about the world without any restrictions, because he is no different from a baby.