Inspiring Inventiveness and Creativity

Sir Robinson was right when he said, "Our public schools focus on educating students out of creativity." I do believe that creativity and adaptability, not facts and statistics, are the keys to a successful future in today's world. After all, nearly all the information we will need to know as adults has not been discovered yet...
Our entire educational structure needs to be revamped if we truly wish to focus on producing the smartest and most competitive adults we can. Robinson focused on the fact that the world education is experiencing "academic inflation." Therefore, it is merely a race to see who can digest and regurgitate the most facts in a lifetime. However, if everyone is able to do that at a great capacity, employers and such will be looking for people who are different-people who are creative, adaptable, and those who can not only apply but those who can expand on the facts they know.
These new-age skills are not only not being focused on in our schools, they are hardly being taught at all. In order to prepare world-ready adults, an entirely new outlook for education must be put into place.
You may then ask, "well, how do we do that?" Truthfully, I do not know. For a national change, I can imagine it would take years of planning and a great sum of government money (which our country does not possess) to do so.
However, every teacher can make a difference-even if it is to just their students. We can choose to apply these analytical and creative processes into our curriculum and into they way we structure our classroom. We can ask students to do the factual, right-wrong, assignments-but then we can ask them to think deeper: to find something related or to journal about their confusions or insights into how the information may be used. We can ask them to demonstrate the higher levels of understanding and creativity by allowing them to structure their own assignments and show how they would apply the knowledge. Who knows, maybe your students have a new, and probably more engaging way of studying and applying factual subjects such as math.
I believe that if the teacher values creativity they can find a way to integrate it into their classroom, no matter how factual or structured their subject area is.