Education for the Creative Individual

In these times of great creative and invention challenges, are our schools producing the great thinkers required?
My father, who was a great inventor, wrote in 1933:

Now let us look at schools and see what the future of the country may be, Are people made like machines, in quantity and to a set standard? Or is education a means of developing the individual? In the main I think we shall find schools to be factories of the more expensive variety. Of course there is at present a very strong trend in teaching towards broader and more individual education, but in general what do we have? Classes of numbers of pupils, I believe, all of whom are graded in a series of numbers that do not relate to any of them. Classes in which the book is the thing, not the pupil. Classes where memory ranks high, imagination low. Classes where every subject is divided into parts instead of classes where the parts are combined to show the whole. Self-sufficiency demands a broad general education put to use according to the need. Schools give a pigeonholed education almost totally removed from use. They tell us it is "memory training" but the memory is only part of the mind.

I couldn't agree more. It was the same in my education 20 years later and is the same now.