How Colleges Kill Creativity

Education has failed? How to survive the college years - and stay creative.

Imagine a big and bright classroom where happy 9-year-old students sit smiling and waiting for the next interesting task from their teacher to accomplish. All they are full of energy, all they are ready to learn something new and creative. A teacher asks them to draw a tree. What can be easier for a child? Some of them get an A for this drawing, other ones have a C, and some students get a big F! Nothing awful has happened here, but the killing of creativity had been just started. 

The ugly truth of life is, that schools and colleges do not teach us how to live and express ourselves, but how to get a degree and increase our chances on getting a better job afterward. 

Education is a system

And as well as any other system, education has its own rules to survive. The majority of college professors do not let their students go outside the frames, and they do that not because they really want it; it's just how the system works actually. And such a system makes students more interested in getting a diploma, not a real education. 

A college teaches us how to learn the info needed to pass all exams. It does not tell us anything about the way to express ourselves, reveal our hidden talents, and use them in our future lives. According to Ken Robinson, the world's leading speaker on innovation and creativity, we all are born with a natural capacity for creativity; and our task is to cultivate this capacity to become successful individuals and live our lives in full. Everyone who listened to his epic speech at TED conference (Do Schools Kill Creativity?) would agree with his point concerning educational systems' fails when it comes to some alternatives for students in expression of their individuality. 

When it comes to the exact curriculum, colleges may easily destroy curious minds of their students: young people start to believe that it will be enough to follow some frames in order to get a grade; moreover, they start to believe that this is fine, and this grade makes them smart and talented enough to accept the challenge at a job market (and win this challenge actually). But does this grade and degree really make them different from thousands of other students with the same grades and degrees? 

Such a tendency makes it more and more difficult for employers to differentiate their potential employees, as they all think stereotypically; and any question that involves a more detailed and creative response than a simple “Yes” or “No” immediately puzzles all those candidates who were the best students in their colleges, and who sincerely believed in their talent and uniqueness. 

So, what is wrong with this system exactly? 

As Sir Ken Robinson claims in his article for Huffington Post,  all systems of education are good in general, and they would be perfect if they were not based on 3 principles mentioned below:

1. They popularize standards and a narrow view, though our talents are very diverse and personal;

2. They promote compliance, though our achievements depend on our creativity and imagination;

3. They are linear, though our lives are largely unpredictable.

As a result, a person starts living his/her life in a wrong way: s/he does not live it actually, but just prepares him/herself for the next level. We are in school to learn how to enter a college; we are in college to learn how to get a job, and so on. And our task is to ask ourselves, what life we are going to live? And start living it right now, not after college or after 20 years of working at some office. 

Is everything so bad? 

Students are very creative people. They are young, full of energy, and always ready to do something crazy and really insane (just check these cool college flash mobs to understand what we mean). They are open to new achievements, new ideas... They believe to have the whole world opened to them, and this is true actually. And every chain of the educational system should work in a way not to kill this flame.

Coming back to those 9-year-old students who drew trees in school, we can see the great example of killing this creativity flame in young people: those students who got A's for their drawing started to think they were very talented artists, when those ones who got F's believed they were losers and could not draw at all. This is the way how a teacher kills creativity by screaming “Don't go outside the lines” when you try to color your painting. Colleges show us “perfect” lines, shapes, triangles, etc. and make us believe that they are perfect indeed. But a narrow view of intelligence is not what we need today.