Not much more than any other source of growing up. From "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art" by Stephen Nachmanovitch: "Schools can nurture creativity in

Not much more than any other source of growing up. From "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art" by Stephen Nachmanovitch: "Schools can nurture creativity in children, but they can also destroy it, and all too often do. Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers." .... "But we have not yet gotten down to the marrow of the matter. We have been talking as though there were something called "society" that defends itself against creativity by all the means we've mentioned above: education, specialization, fear of the new, fear of raw creative power. There is no such thing as society, there is no such thing as institutions, schools, the media, and the rest of it. There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs. The marrow of the matter is that however we might restructure society, however many resources an enlightened regime might bestow on the fostering of creativity and the arts and sciences and freewheeling education dedicated to the deep exploration of mind, spirit, and heart, we would still be in the same soup. There is something called growing up, which happens to us no matter what our circumstances. We all have learned what it feels like to be betrayed for the first time, the second time, the third time, when our innocence gets stripped away, and we jump from innocence to experience. There is a point, or rather a long series of points, at which our innocence and free play of imagination and desire collides with reality, with the limits of is and is not, with the limits of what can and cannot be. "Everything we have said so far should not be construed merely as an indictment of the big bad schools, or the media or other societal factors. We could redesign many aspects of society in a more wholesome way--and we ought to--but even then art would not be easy. The fact is that we cannot avoid childhood's end; the free play of imagination creates illusions, and illusions bump into reality and get disillusioned. Getting disillusioned, presumably, is a fine thing, the essence of learning; but it hurts. If you think that you could have avoided the disenchantment of childhood's end by having had some advantage--a more enlightened education, more money or other material benefits, a great teacher--talk to someone who has had those advantages, and you will find that they bump into just as much disillusionment because the fundamental blockages are not external but part of us, part of life. In any case, the child's delightful pictures of trees mentioned at the beginning of this chapter would probably not be art if they came from the hands of an adult. The difference between the child's drawings and the childlike drawing of a Picasso resides not only in Picasso's impeccable mastery of craft, but in the fact that Picasso had actually grown up, undergone hard experience, and transcended it."