How School Stifles Creativity and Other Shit

Coronavirus is my fault. I was thinking a couple months ago how I was working a lot and I said to myself, “I wish I had more time to write. I need a writing retreat or something.” WELL LOOKIE HERE I DONE MANIFESTED MYSELF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC!

Dreams really do come true…

I’m kidding. I would never dream of a pandemic. That would be a weird dream to have. Could you imagine? You wake up one morning with a grin the size of Texas on your face and the whore next to you asks “what are you so happy about?” and you’re like,  “I just had the BEST dream!”

So many things about that scenario are wrong. Like why did the whore sleep over? If you’re a whore, don’t you usually just do your business and leave? Maybe he paid for cuddles. He seems like the kind of guy who would pay for cuddles. I mean if you’re dreaming up global pandemics, you’re probably pretty lonely. Poor guy. If only he had a teddy bear named Franco.

What was I thinking about today that was interesting? Oh! Oh oh oh! I’ve got it. I was thinking about our education system. I was writing about it actually. My thought was that essentially our education system is designed to turn us into good employees and not good people. It’s designed to make us compliant, not capable.

Think about the most important things you must do in order to achieve a good grade. One: turn the assignment in on time. Two: follow the directions. If you do these two things, you can do well in high school and get a college degree. Our system rewards those who follow directions, are punctual, don’t question authority, and stay inside the lines.

I was thinking about how if you’re a creative person, like a truly creative person, school is the worst place you could possibly find yourself. School is all about order, and if you never take an art class or a creative writing class or what have you, you’ll never come across a scenario in school where you are rewarded for turning chaos into beauty. You’ll just be stuck doing what somebody tells you to do and how they tell you to do it, constantly churning the wheel to make somebody else’s butter.

SOMEBODY ELSE’S BUTTER! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT!?

Actually, a lot of people do want that. School and jobs work for most people because most people want direction. They want someone to tell them what to do with their life, where to go, and when to go do it. Because let’s be honest, none of us know what the fuck we’re doing. It’s a lot easier if there’s a blueprint in front of us.

Like hey you should do what your teachers tell you to do so you can get good grades and then go to college and do what they tell you to do there so you can get a good job and then do what they tell you to do there so you can have an income and you won’t get fired so then you can buy a house so you can trap yourself inside and tell your kids what to do so they can go to school and have their teachers tell them what to do so they can get good grades and go to college so their professors can tell them what to do… you get the idea.

Like I said, it works for most people. I don’t know if it makes most people happy to live this kind of life, but it at least makes them feel as if they’re achieving something worthwhile enough to not blow their brains out. Goals are really important. We need to feel like we’re achieving something. So the plan of high school, college, job, raise, house, kids, etc. keeps us moving as a society. If we were all just winging it, we’d be kind of screwed.

One of my weaknesses is how I can descend into chaos when I don’t have an ordered goal to work towards. I realized around age sixteen or seventeen that I was different and that I wanted to do my own thing. I got incredibly sick and it woke me up. I understood deeply that life is fragile, and I knew I didn’t want anyone else telling me how to live it.

It hasn’t been easy. It’s very lonely sometimes. Most people don’t understand me. They can’t fathom why I don’t want to just take over my dad’s business. They don’t understand why I dropped out of a prestigious business school to study creative writing at a state college. To them it looks like an opportunity wasted, but to me it was the start of a life worth living.

I have to set goals and guidelines for myself, too. And I have to test those guidelines. Often time they don’t work and they need to be adjusted. The thing about paving your own path is that you have to learn how to pave a path. You can’t just start walking and hope you wind up where you want to go. At some point you have to pave a path.

It takes much less time if a path is already there and you simply have to follow it. That’s why most people do it. It saves so much trouble. But you don’t get to look down at the path and say “I did this. All of it. This is my path.” You just get to keep walking and say “this works.”