On Schools and Creativity
School’s don’t teach you how to be successful creatively. They teach you how to be successful in almost every other way, but never creatively. They teach you how to introduce yourself, how to write formula-type-papers, how to properly cite sources, how to pen a letter, and what to wear on your first job interview, but they leave the creative part up to you.
No one teaches you how to write for a living or what that entails. They don’t teach you the jobs available, the way they work, or how to go about getting them. They don’t teach you how to be a novelist or a painter or a musician; those things are just transparent to them or perhaps non-existent. No one teaches you how to write when all you feel inside of you is despair; they don’t teach you how to climb out of that hole you’re in: that black thing that sucks you in further and further and truly create something brilliant. They don’t teach you how to write, when to write, why you should write at all. To them it’s just curriculum—another way of getting your point across.
They don’t teach you how to react when you place you and all of your emotions out for the world to see and it gets rejected. They don’t teach you how to deal with the level of frustration and anxiety that comes with being creative; the need to create every day of your life and how draining that is on your spirit. They don’t teach you how to deal with the natural depression that comes from taking in the world as a whole and trying to squeeze it out into a collective paragraph of words day in and day out. They don’t teach you how to beg, to steal, to borrow, to cheat, or lie your way to the top. They don’t even teach you where the top is.
What they do teach you is so counter-productive: it’s this image of how great the creative minds were; that they operated differently and saw things in different ways than the general whole did. Then in the next breath they demand you write a four-page-paper on the matter and curse you when you use contractions.
School’s strip away creativity or true knowledge. They have to. They can’t operate with that happening; they can’t pass tests when they’re forced to teach you things outside the text. They can’t show you how to deal with depression because it’s not “economical” or “conducive to the lecture”. They can’t show you how to breathe; to create; to live! They can’t show you those things because to them they don’t exist, to them they’re just words used by absent-minded people.
And so the creative mind lingers on taking in the mass amount of emotional information they come across every day and attempting to re-assign that into something solid and truthful only to be met with depression.
