Education for innovation

Engineering education should encourage students to strive for a mastery of fundamentals and the cultivation of excellence¿but this is not enough. Engineering education must be kept alive and relevant; and, to encourage creativity, it must stimulate the imaginations of students. The typical educational yard-stick of a student´s performance, however, is the accuracy with which he can repeat, by rote, information obtained from a lecture or text. Original or unconventional approaches to problems are discouraged, and their proponents often penalized, thus discouraging and depressing the student. Must inventiveness be sacrificed to education?