child,

Saturday afternoon
From all the jails the boys and girls
Ecstatically leap,-
Beloved, only afternoon
That prison doesn't keep.

They storm the earth and stun the air,
A mob of solid bliss.
Alas! that frowns could lie in wait
For such a foe as this!
Emily Dickinson

How did I lose the creative child in me ? As a child I was creative. How come I now have to work so hard to be it again? Perhaps this is the wrong book and I should be reading 'Treasure Island'! Well, anyway, the little child thinks a lot. It experiments (the baby tries most, but eats only what it likes). Has a rich imagination (a stick is a gun, a rock a fortress) and has an endless curiosity. More often than not this is rewarded by:"No, don't, you're too young for that." The judgement of the child, although unripe, is extraordinarily active. Many a parent knows the feeling of desperation when confronted with endless questions such as "How does grass grow?" At the age of 2 most children have mastered a language without text books and regular repetitions or grades. Then they go to school and their natural curiosity is slowly (one hopes) led into channels, since there is a time for everything. Quite often schools use fixed and tried out texts, accurately described laboratory practice and disciplined study periods. It seems like a bridge with strong railing and for those trying to climb the railing, special nets are provided. There is hardly a chance to learn in one's own manner and style. Somehow it seems we're not unique as far as learning is concerned!?!
Owing to this practice there is hardly an opportunity to develop one's own judgement. Inventiveness and zeal are lost under the constant pressure to do the tasks set. so what happens? There is hardly any chance of practice (except during holidays). The baby puts everything in its mouth (chemical laboratory), tries to break it (tensile strength test), and does this not because it is told to do so, but because it wants to find out things.
At (most) schools most attention is focussed on what is learned and not so much on that learning takes place. It made Einstein wonder how modern learning methods had not completely stifled the holy curiosity for learning. For apart from stimulation, inquisitiveness, he said, mainly needs freedom.
Perhaps a short detour to your (school)career up till now, may help to explain this point. School teaches us a lot of rules that are based on reasons that (at the time) made a lot of sense. Time passes and things change. Often the rules do not change (see also change & crisis) as the need is not seen, or people are just lazy. So the original reasons for the existing rules may no longer be valid, but because the rules are still in place many continue to follow them. For instance, children are taught to use copy books with preprinted lines and squares. Up till then they used big white sheets to draw according to their fancy. On these sheets they mostly started in the middle, which is not so bad because you can then move in all directions. However, in the copy-books they are taught to start at the top left-hand corner and move downward, in one colour and neat handwriting (very monotonous). Why may they no longer use the white sheets with colourful pictures ...and.... text? Because it is the rule, started perhaps because notebooks with neat writing are easier to correct.... and abstract thinking uses no drawings (visualization). No distinction is made between learning and result.
Variety in input (notably visualization) is important to people who are extremely innovative. This is amply recorded in the literature. In a letter to J. Hadamard (taken from The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin), Albert Einstein said:

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and combined .... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."

Well of course some will say, that is only for the geniuses, but the rules have been made for the average child, so let us stick to them.

creativity > testing the rules against the present facts: asking why?