Last night, I was caught in the intellectual trap that is TED Talks. Once I start with those, it seems, it takes nothing less than a miracle to get me out of my uber-ponderous, creative mood. One talk, however, sparked my interest in an familiar way. The talk was by Ken Robinson and it was called Schools Kill Creativity.

You see, in high school I learned two things. One, how to regurgitate facts back onto a bubble sheet using a no.2 pencil. Second, I learned how to skip class as much as possible without my grades going down. I claimed, much to the chagrin of my parents and those in academia, that I wasn’t learning useful things.   I was learning how to memorize a series of facts and how to learn what other people wanted me to learn. Hardly an incubator for creativity.

I was a pretty creative kid too, I built my own, personal snow making machines, invented a ski tow that was powered by the wheel of a car; I was constantly creating. These skills, however, had no place in school. Teachers didn’t have answers to MY questions, they had answers to questions that related to the upcoming test, after all, we wouldn’t want the entire class getting behind from the teacher indulging one student’s tangent. If I didn’t ask my question and stopped listening for one tiny second in order to chew on the idea in my mind I could miss important facts; ones I might need to know for a test later.

Teachers are not at fault though, they are pressured into getting kids to perform well on standardized tests which our systems have made the end-all be-all of student achievement and, by which, schools are frequently judged. The only question that remains in my mind is…how do any of us make it out of such a situation with, a) good enough grades to graduate, and b) our creativity still intact?