Is Education Stifling Creativity?

After reading Mr. O'Connor's blog post about creativity, I started thinking a lot about how creativity affects education, but more about how education affects creativity. I came upon a video of Sir Ken Robinson giving a speech called "How Schools Stifle Creativity" at the TED conference in 2006.

This video showed me a perspective that I was lacking as a student myself. Mr. Robinson believes that although we are all born with great innate talents and creativity, our creative abilities are not recognized in traditional schooling curriculums and we are therefore rarely able to apply them in settings where they should matter the most, in places where it has the greatest potential to grow if given the opportunity.

Education is narrowly focused to the output. As Mr. Robinson puts it, the goal of public education is to produce young adults that have the cognitive ability to be "college professors," a profession where factual education trumps creativity. He makes the argument that "We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it... we get educated out of it." I've never given this idea much thought, and right after I watched the video, I didn't think I agreed with Mr. Robinson's perspective. But after pondering it for a while, I have realized that traditional schooling environments don't give kids and young adults the opportunity to regularly tap into their creative abilities, and since it is not actively being used, it becomes useless.

Where do you stand on this issue? Do you believe that school systems are stifling (not necessarily intentionally) children's creativity, or not? Does academic accomplishment define success? How does creativity have a role in success?