Becoming 'creative' in school!

I was laughing and grimacing over the so-called New Education Policy recently with some of my more intelligent and well-informed old boys. There is nothing really 'new' about the policy: it is just a mish-mash of ill-coordinated, incoherent, rehashed ideas which have been suggested by numerous policy declarations before, and either never worked, or worked poorly, or proved to be self-defeating (such as the 'new' emphasis on vocational courses and replacing English with vernaculars as medium of teaching). What I have found truly laughable is the apparently new stress on encouragement of independent, critical, original thinking in the classroom. Let me lay out what I have learnt about the whole teaching-learning process over a lifetime in this context (our policy makers never consult dedicated, competent, well-grounded teachers when they throw out their brilliant brainwaves! so I have always wondered where they get their ideas from)...

Independent, original, critical thinking is not even relevant to many subjects which are taught at school. How can you be independent and original and creative when you are learning chemistry and history? Basically you have to memorize a lot of hard facts (such as dates and names) and techniques (such as balancing equations): there's never been any way around it. If you can't do that, and retain what you have memorized beyond examinations, you just don't know chemistry and history, period. And your mathematics teacher might occasionally challenge you by asking you to solve riders or work out a new way to prove a theorem, but try to be too creative and start writing three squared equals six, and you will flunk. 

Nowhere does school-level education offer greater scope of creativity than while learning a language (explain in your own words... write an original story ... what in your opinion was this character like as a human being?...), but what do we actually see happening in thousands of even so-called 'elite' schools? Let us face it: they stopped even trying to teach how to write long ago (that is why they now take 'creative writing' classes at college- and university level) - truth is, most schoolteachers themselves cannot write a decent essay impromptu to save their lives! -  and where literature is concerned, thousands of my readers will concur that their schoolteachers used to insist that while answering questions, it was imperative that they regurgitate lines crammed from their texts, word by word; nothing else was required of them, and 'don't you dare say the same thing in your own way'. All examinees should write identical answers in literature exactly as they would in chemistry. It is these creatures, these 'teachers', who will now be told to 'teach' their wards to be independent-minded, original, and creative in the way they think. Can anyone describe the situation better than with words like 'farce' or 'black comedy'?

One last thing. Which genius came up with the notion that everybody can be independent and original and creative? That we can 'produce' Newtons and Tagores and Beethovens by the million by schooling them? I should like to meet him alone in a dark alley some day...