Particularly within formal education, where the skills involved in creating should be given maximum opportunity to flourish and develop, there is precious little understanding of the frames of mind responsible for creative thought and of the nature of the teaching strategies that facilitate their expression. After the early years of schooling, the educational system seems to become dominated by telic thinking and to militate ever more strongly against the paratelic state. There is ample emphasis upon the telic aspects of creativity as the preparation and verification stages, but little allowance for the paratelic joy of illumination, or for the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings. The editor rules, though all too often the author is unable to supply him with anything worth the editing.

A natural result of this approach is that students are soon conditioned to fear possibilities for making mistakes, of revealing ignorance or showing their feelings. This fear causes telic anxiety and they prefer to operate at low arousal. They then get bored, start to misbehave, the teachers react with more restriction and a negative learning spiral is established.