As children, it seemed that most of us liked to create stories. These stories were always located in a land far far away where chairs were clouds, the houses were made from candy, and the characters were always abnormally happy. We had this fantastic imagination that could take us anywhere by closing our eyes and using our minds. We would create these scenarios, like how the floor was lava and our furniture was the only safe places. We would take regular old cardboard boxes that seemed useless to our parents and make them our spaceships, race cars, or even our houses. We use to have imaginary friends, that while the characteristics of them now seem quite odd and somewhat creepy, they were our best friends. As children, we made music out of nothing. We made art out of nothing. We made a creative life out of nothing. Why don't we carry this throughout adulthood or even as we are growing up? I, personally, blame college.
While my creativity began to dwindle in high school, I could always count on my English class for an hour and 15 minutes every day to bring out the once colorful imagination that my mind use to contain. I had teachers who would say, "Write a new ending for this story," or "What if the villain had won, tell me what that would have looked like." Stories like these are what kept the creative juices flowing. It kept me interested in my class and gave me the urge to want to learn.
However, it was not until I came into college when I finally discovered that my years of honing in on my creativity were useless. Professors want facts. They want to know the history. They want a textbook answer. After writing at least 100 papers in my college career, I can officially say that there is not once ounce of creativity in them. I do not find the need to use colorful words anymore because apparently, those words are too bright in such a serious paper. I use to enjoy writing papers, but that was because I could broaden my vocabulary and make a somewhat dull paper, colorful. Now, I dread every single moment when I have to write a paper.
College is supposed to be the place where your intelligence is tested. College English courses should be full of literature in which students get to analyze. All my courses have ever done is push the facts on me; they have never pushed the "what if" on me. Due to me not being able to show my creativity anymore, I feel as if I have lost it. No, I feel as if college has killed my creativity. Now that I am an adult, college says that I am no longer allowed to think outside of the box. They say that my creative ideas are too much and too far fetched.
College trains you to follow rules and never go outside of them. Those rules: thesis statement, topic sentence, body, body, body, conclusion, reiterate topic sentence. Read, highlight, study, regurgitate. Flashcards, repetition, speak, test. Even as an English major, I am taught six things: research, papers, read, read, read, test. After those six things are done I must agree or disagree with the research, expand on the research, learn new grammar rules, and repeat or read the material, expand on the material, write papers that analyze the material. These rules and tasks are nailed into our heads that we forget how creative we use to be. We forget how beautiful our words can be. Picasso once said, "All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. We are educated out of it."
College trains you to become a good worker, rather than a creative thinker. We are taught rules after rules after rules instead of allowing our minds to wander. We are all taught the same thing and this is why we cannot come up with something original. College trains us all to be exactly the same. College trains us to all think the same. College has killed our individuality. College has killed our creativity.
Watch Ken Robinson's TED talk "How Schools Kill Creativity."
