Defining Our Limits: A Calling for Creativity

“We’re going to do it this way today.”

And so began my struggle with school.

From a very early age, we’re taught that there’s only one way to do things. Only one way to learn to read, to write, to ride a bike. Everything must be done at a certain age. Not earlier, not later. And it all must be done one way.

I remember when I was taught how to write my letters--that was the worst year of my life. There are plenty of adults I know whose penmanship looks like nothing more than scratches on paper. But my teacher criticized and marked me down for each little mistake, and by the end of the year, when report cards came out, I received a check mark for handwriting that was not as neat and beautiful as it should be. But who can dare tell an eight-year old that her hand writing is bad? That the loops at the ends of her A’s are wrong or that I’s shouldn’t be dotted with hearts, she’s just being creative.

Every year the teachers give the whole “poetry is about being creative and expressing how you feel” speech.

Oscar Wilde tells us that “to define is to limit.” Because right after they tell you all about creativity, they give you directions on how you have to write a poem, counting out each individual syllable and making them rhyme. But I want things not to rhyme. I want to make someone cry by rhyming sunshine with raincloud and summer with winter and smile with tear. I want each stanza, wait, why should I even use stanzas if I don’t need them? I can have a million lines if I wanted because that’s what poetry is.

Art doesn’t have to be in the lines of the paper. Art isn’t meant to be taught, it’s meant to be experienced, learned, felt, made. Just because they colors don’t seem to “complement” or “represent” or “contrast”. I’ll distemper you, too bad I don’t know what that means because I didn’t pay attention in your class.

They teach you to do everything in your head, so as not to speak your mind, so when you get older you can keep opinions to yourself and fall below a power that in which you should take part.

So I stand for creativity. For the opportunity that each child is endowed with to write and not be told it doesn’t fit a curriculum’s idea of education. In a world where the college majors that are considered to be most profitable are the ones that rely on concrete facts, it becomes impossible to think for oneself. Although this cannot kill the physical body, the ability to be creative is what has saved lives around the world. It is a global epidemic that we can no longer ignore.

Creativity allows us to realize our discontent: with our government, with our world, with ourselves. When this is taken away, we cannot realize what we need.