Sir Ken Robinson has famously spoken about the terrible lack of creativity in educational and intellectual society and institutions. He jokes with some degree of black humor that watching a disco full of Ph.D’s is to watch a group of disembodied heads, lacking a sense of kinesthetic, artistic and social/emotional competencies. He castigates our educational systems as too heavily dedicated to the cortex and weighted mainly to the left (linear and logical).
Einstein’s relevant quote above gets at this imbalance.
As I see it,an aspect of this problem is that schools don’t do enough production; meaning there isn’t much in the way of helping kids apply theoretical knowledge; they hardly ever build or produce anything. If teachers knew how to do this and students made and produced things, actual useful things (and this can include artistic expressions too), you would see an immediate and corresponding rise in self worth and self efficacy, which is the belief in the value of one’s efforts to accomplish.
Watch this favorite video of mine at another TED Talk, with the genius of the Handspring Puppet Company. Imagine the math, physics and design attributes that these brilliant guys and their “puppets” represent application of.