One of the current ideas in education is the idea that to creat creative people we must teach outside the norm. The norm being the way we have taught students for 100s of years. No more "drill n' kill" and rote memorization for the child of the 21th century. Progessive math will he little Brooke or Dillon find out how to find out the answer or better yet not find an answer or still better find many answers. All of this in pursuit of the "creative" child.
The only problem in this is that there is no evidence that memorization and mastery stifles the imagination. In fact a quick look at late 19th century - early 20th century Germany seems to indicate otherwise. Most of the great discoveries in a surprisingly larger number of technical fields was made by German scientists. Scientists who were the products of the most rigorous and demanding education system on the planet Earth. Academic failure resulted in a short trip into the manual arts.
These guys pushed the technical frontiers with things like quantum theory and relativity. I wonder if the current crop of non traditional students will have that kind of impact?