The deeper I get into my education the more I find my creativity being trampled on. It has gotten to the point where I sit down to be creative (write a poem, draw, dance etc) and I feel as if I have almost forgotten to use that part of my brain. It has become a chore to read books out of pure interest because I have to squeeze in reading time throughout my day.

I find it ironic that colleges, even liberal arts colleges, encourage free thought and expansion of passions when there is little room to simultaneously academically achieve and be passionately creative. The times when I am meant to be creative, in my fiction writing class, for example, I feel as if I am in foreign waters. Why is it that in order to get a higher education we must snuff out our imagination? I miss the childlike creativity I once knew.

Even though I do not consider myself a visual artist I find it meditative to be creative through art, yet I have little time to do so, and even if I did, my education has hammered it into my brain that if I am not following specific instructions I will be incapable of functioning. I do not understand how higher education institutions expect students to go from doing everything they are told, following a day by day syllabus, to being hurled into the real world that needsinnovation — that needscreative minds. Shouldn't we be truly fostering environments that encourage free learning — without deadlines and GPAs to dictate our interests? This is not to say that deadlines and GPAs aren't necessary, they are, to an extent. We have to make room for students to be humans — creative, emotional, vibrant, living, breathing, humans.

I miss reading Faulkner during lunch in high school just because I wanted to. I brought a total of eight books on my spring break vacation this year: Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, a book about the bubonic plague, a book on mindful meditation, a book about the first crusades, Alice in Wonderland etc. These books are ones I have been staring at all semester, longing to read, while I pour over my readings for school that at this point have just become a dulled blur that I am meant to regurgitate for midterms and finals.

I know this article will float out of my hands into the fleeting chasm of the Internet but I am sure other students agree with me. We should be able to have a traditional higher level education while also being able to truly be creative. We should be allowed to learn out of a passion for knowledge and passion for human imagination — not to finesse a system of false validation.