Creativity and School

I recently watched Tim Brown's Lecture on creativity in children at play, as well as Sir Ken Robinson's Lecture on the idea of schools killing creativity.  Both of these short presentations left me with a slight sinking feeling in my gut, which I quickly dismissed as general crippling fear of the future (Due to my unwarranted and unearned crotchetiness), but it led me down a a very honest sort of thought process.

Me, circa 1995.  Was anyone ever so young and naive?   (Photo by M@rg.  I was surprised to see me on Wikimedia Commons, too.)

 A lot of the criticism in this area (and I hear a whole lot of it, being an education student), comes from bashing the very idea of curriculum.  And also teachers.  Theorists really hate teachers.

And so, presumably, do cartoonists.

Now I understand why people hate both of these ideas.  My parish priest once told me that when he was in college, those who couldn't hack it in the major programs would default into an education program.  I've had some apathetic teachers, sure, but for every terrible teacher, I had at least one (maybe one point five) teachers who were caring, and even encouraging.  Maybe I was lucky, but I'm not ready to write off America's Teachers just yet.
So is it Curriculum that's to blame?  I'm not ready to say that yet either.  Our standards are their to prepare students.  These are good standards, they make good, or at least proficient humans.  So if we have good teachers and good curriculum, what's the problem?

I think it's fear of failure.

And I think that because we want our students to be creative, but when they try something original, and it doesn't conform to the rubric or grading scale or whatever schools use, then those students get Bs.  If they do it well.  Or they fail.  We don't grade on creativity.  We're involuntarily discouraging it.