A child sees a cloud and calls it a cotton ball in the sky; the adults around the child marvel at the creativity. A child hears a pig grunt and imitates the noise and the adults smile at the child's ability to mimic. Then the child goes to school and learns that the cloud is water vapor and that pigs go "oink" and that it is rude to make grunting noises—and people say we've trained the creativity out of them. They are correct, but for entirely the wrong reasons.

Creativity is the ability to know the cloud is water vapor and still see the cotton ball, to look at what one knows to be true and see the possibilities of what might be true.

In schools we teach our children math as a set of tables and a set of specific formula which are to be parroted back in a limited amount of time. This is like teaching cooking by having people make microwave dinners.

We teach and evaluate with the idea that there are correct answers and incorrect answers, but there are no different answers. So not only are we taught that clouds are water vapor, but that any other possibility is wrong. This bleeds over into our views in politics, where our views are correct and other people's views are wrong.

We place label knowledge into categories and then believe the categories and labels define the discipline. We teach math, history, physics, chemistry, art, music, theology, philosophy, etc., as if they were separate, unrelated fields. In times of limited budgets, we cut the music and art programs as luxuries failing to realize the importance of creative thinking in the sciences.

Labels and stereotypes do serve the function of tying an idea down for discussion, but when the labels become more important than the concepts they represent, then we become blind to further learning.

In this section I explore the world while trying to ignore the artificial boundaries created by labels.