Our story of revolutionary science is one of independence, creativity and free-thinking radicals. Thomas Kuhn saw things differently. He thought that dogmatic commitment to established norms is the unexpected engines of science’s success, writes Vasso Kindi.

Creativity is of great significance, especially in the arts and sciences where originality and novelty are highly valued. Because of its significance, many scholars have tried to explain how it is made possible. Educators and psychologists, in particular, have investigated the correlations between creativity and personality traits, giving emphasis to independence, imagination, flexibility, and open-mindedness.

In 1950, the psychologist J. P. Guilford thought that mass education, which stresses conformity, discourages the development of creative personality (Guilford 1950, 448). Sixty years later, the same thought was expressed by the educator Sir Ken Robinson in his 2010 TEDx talk entitled “Changing education paradigms”. He there argued that we have to go “in the exact opposite direction” of an education that has been modeled in the image of industrialism which favors conformity and standardization. In Ken Robinson’s view, we should adopt a new paradigm that encourages divergent thinking, i.e., thinking of new possibilities and unconventional and innovative ideas, which is “an essential capacity for creativity”.