The primary strand of the NZ high school curriculum is bloody appalling in this regard. When I was in school, maths/chem/physics for the most part involved blindly plugging in numbers to formulas sans creativity. English involved memorising the essays the teacher would write on the board and regurgitating them during exam time. French and Latin were my only subjects which were stimulating for their content alone. I did have some great teachers but it can be hard even for them to inspire anyone when tethered to such a dull curriculum where the underlying goal is to ensure as many people as possible meet the bare minimum requirements. The exception to this is the scholarship exams which actually involve some sort of creativity, ingenuity and understanding. I really wish I stayed in Australia for high school.
As for our universities, I think they're pretty similar in standard to those elsewhere in the world. I'm sorely disappointed that my university insists on pigeon-holing students to one language (Java) for 99% of programming assignments (even the 'open-ended' ones) but I'd say in general that creativity is encouraged, not stifled.
The thing with software engineering is that aside from fundamental theory, a lot of information is ephemeral in nature - information has a half-life and learning a new technology is often done as necessary rather than for the sake of it. And that is what makes it even more insulting when students are dragooned into rote learning flavour of the week (or on the other hand, stupidly archaic/obsolete) technologies at the whim of a lecturer whose teachings are distorted by whatever he/she happens to be researching at the time... it's exactly that kind of 'teaching' which stifles creativity... I've had to tolerate it in a few of my papers so far.
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