Adding to the confusion: Education in my opinion is not meant for getting an answer or training a brain , certainly is to condition the brain to a state of rationalization and reasoning ! First question my answer : Tree !

Dear Tolga Soyata, "Is EDUCATION making us lose the purity of our brain"? A Brain is a dynamic storage system of human body which sores information. Storage system doesn't concern about the purity. How information is superimposed with noise may make difference on so called purity of information but not the brain. Education which adds information (with good or bad classifications) but this doesn't mean we should blame like this that the education making us to lose the purity of brain. Its like computer memory it doesn't bother what you store.

It may be true that simple solutions are not regarded as equally "good" as a more complex one for adults, even when both solve the problem. This seems to be especially true for researchers where simple solutions must be camouflaged with complex math to make it acceptable by the peers :-)

But from your example questions, I'm not sure if I can follow them. You say that a 7 year-old would say CO2 or red light absorbtion? I'm not sure that would happen :-)

In my opinion, I don't think education damages our brain. On the contrary, it's good for our brain to be challenged with new information.

What does happen is that we get conditioned into set ways of thinking, thus limiting our perpective of the whole. Just think of some of the greatest inventors out there e.g. Nicola Tesla, who had no formal education. I think perhaps he was a great inventor , because he was not trained to limit himself to what was considered possible. History has also shown that people often invent something outside their field of expertise e.g. Nick Holonyak's LED. It is said that if he knew anything about chemistry, he would not have attempted it, because it was impossible.

Another example, I've seen young children build robots with Lego Mindstorms, with great success, while post graduate students often cannot get the most elementary things done. I think the difference is that the school kids doesn't know what they want to achieve is "impossible", so they just do it.

Perhaps the most limiting factor for the human mind is not our education, or lack thereof, but rather what we think is or is not possible.

@Matthias. Precisely my point. I am referring to your statement "simple solutions must be camouflaged with complex math." Sometimes, in research, we find that, simple thinking produces surprisingly good solutions, but, there is no reward for explaining them in simple terms ...

My favorite example is Euler's formula involving the prime numbers. Now, Euler is one of the best mathematicians of all times. But, his proof that rocked the mathematics world was based on a Sieve that was invented in 3rd century BC. I can count many examples of how incredibly simple thinking yields incredibly powerful results. Euler's proof is so simple that, somebody without deep math knowledge can understand it.

Dear Tolga Soyata, I want to share an interesting Essay on this topic.

Reference: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/emergentpedagogy.html

"We end this essay by encouraging our fellow educators to try out some forms of emergent pedagogy themselves. In so doing we have in mind not only the health and well-being of our students and ourselves, but of the educational enterprise of which we are all a part--as well as the national and world communities which depend on that educational enterprise. Education serves a variety of functions. We think none is more important than assuring that all humans have the capacity to think for themselves, in order to function effectively in the local, national, and world contexts that are themselves complex emergent systems. For educators like us who see a significant need for effective renewal of the educational enterprise, we offer emergent pedagogy as a pedagogical style for the classroom, as an avenue to meaningful change throughout the educational system, and beyond it as well".