Creativity is the driving force of technological innovation and sustainable economic growth in the knowledge society. A central question, therefore, is how education helps to enhance creativity. As East Asian countries occupy the top of performance tests such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it is most important to understand the type of creativity they stand for. For doing so, we first investigate the revival of Confucianism and its idea of creativity in these countries in comparison with the Western Enlightenment idea of creativity. Secondly, we scrutinize how far these two types of creativity are represented in PISA’s understanding of problem solving which is assumed to require creativity from students. Thirdly, we conduct multilevel regression analyses with data from the 2009 PISA test to find out which learning strategies help to achieve in the PISA test and to close achievement gaps based on socioeconomic family background and how they relate to the two types of creativity. Two countries representing the Confucian tradition, the Republic of Korea and Singapore, and two countries representing the Western tradition, the United States and Canada, serve as test cases. As a culturally diverse world needs both types of creativity, the fundamental question is whether PISA helps them to flourish both.