we don't need no higher education

Thomas Edison never went to university.

It may be that fewer people going into higher education results in a net gain for creativity. A new book by Andrew Robinson about the nature of creative genius argues that university contributes little to creative excellence, and indeed stifles it:

The academy's emphasis on specialization and its "inherent tendency to ignore or reject highly original work that does not fit the existing paradigm" is an impediment to creativity, Robinson argues. He points to several intriguing studies. One, by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, suggests that creativity flourishes best among those with the equivalent of two years of an undergraduate education—no less, no more. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University, has also looked at the relationship between education and innovation. In his 1996 book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, he argued that formal education has historically had little effect on the lives of creative people. "If anything," Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls."

Comments

[peter]

On the other hand, Isaac Newton (inventor of the calculus), Charles Babbage (inventor of the first large mechanical computers), Albert Einstein (creator of modern physics) and Alan Turing (inventor of the electric computer) all went to university. I think each one of these four men has influenced modern life at least as much as Thomas Edison.

In addition, none of the four were American.

[sibylle]

Steve Jobs went to Reed College for a year or two, but then quit.