Creativity used to be seen as a liability and now it’s your best asset

19th-century industrialization needed a specific format for teaching that graduated people who could be applied to the needs of a rapidly developing class of wealthy industrialists.

Twentieth and 21st-century school curricula are based on the 19th-century philosophy that the primary emphasis of education ought to be on the socialization process and the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge and utilitarian skills.

Since the 19th century, the overarching goal of school curricula was and remains, to provide the individual with the means to be economically self-reliant.

From the mid-1800s onwards, education was viewed as a means of perpetuating the national cultural identity of the country. The education system ferreted out a select group of male students who were further educated in the established universities.

In this way, an elite corps of intellectual and political leaders self-selected from the general populace, with the primary function of debating and preserving the tenets of the common cultural identity and guiding its continuing evolution.