Two empirical investigations showed that achieved eminence as a creator can sometimes be a curvilinear, inverted-U function of the level of formal education attained by the individual. Typically, the peak falls approximately in the last
year of undergraduate education. Because these findings suggest that formal education might not always be conducive to creative development, I examined the possibility that a complex and sometimes conflicting relation might ensue from the very definition of what it means to be creative. From there I introduced two formal definitions, one for personal (little-c) creativity and the other for consensual (Big-C) creativity. The implications of these definitions indeed supported the conclusion that formal education cannot have a simple positive linear association with creativity, and under certain circumstances that association can become neg