ABSTRACT
T S Eliot's view of literary creation, at least in his earlier criticism, arises from his self-definition as a classicist. The relevance of Eliot's views on literary creation to discussions about creativity in schools is that they warn off those who might think that encouraging creativity is incompatible with an emphasis on transmission and thus requires a radical restructuring of the curriculum to make it more 'open' and 'problem-centred'. Eliot's point is that creativity depends on transmission. The valuing of people who are creative, divergent, innovative, free-thinking, autonomous and individualist has also, in the West, been an intellectual leitmotif for more than two centuries. Modernity, which dominates our ways of thinking at both deep and superficial levels, privileges those who reject inherited values and beliefs and who struggle against static societies and traditional hierarchies. Part of the attractiveness of 'creativity' as an educational objective is that it goes with the grain of some of our deepest assumptions about the world.
