In Trying Not to Try, Edward Slingerland writes:

René Descartes, in his Meditations (1641), famously declared that you can’t accept as reliable knowledge what you’ve been taught in school. The only way to obtain true knowledge, he argued, is to acquire it yourself, building up logically from first principles. This is a seductive idea, and very deep-seated in our culture, but it’s almost certainly wrong. To a degree that qualitatively differentiates us from other animals, we are born incomplete, primed to learn specific types of things from our culture but absolutely dependent upon culture to provide them. We celebrate creativity and novelty but tend not to notice the extent to which any artist or business innovator has been shaped by the ideas and efforts of others, both living and dead. There is a trivial sense in which the technological magic worked by Steve Jobs, for instance, depended on preexisting technologies and ideas. There is a more profound sense in which his creativity could have emerged only from the social and cultural milieu of a particular historical moment in Silicon Valley.