The Death of Creative Writing in Schools

One of the things I’ve noticed since beginning my blog is just how hard it is to really write. The ability to put words on paper in an attractive manner is difficult in and of itself, but when you are writing creatively, writing stories and novels, it becomes infinitely more complicated. I consider myself a fairly decent writer, doing my best to write my own novel in my spare time, but I find myself hitting blocks far more often than I should, doing far more research than actual writing. I was sitting alone the other day, looking at a blank sheet of paper, willing the story to materialize on the paper, when I think I may have stumbled upon the reason for my difficulty. Public school English courses.

The problem as I see it stems mainly from standardized testing. When English teachers are teaching their curriculum, they aren’t giving students the tools they need to become a successful writer, least of all creative writers. What they are doing is teaching for a test. The national desire for uniform success leads to students learning a style of writing that is formulaic and predictable, rather than emphasizing literary techniques and how to combine them in multiple ways to create original work. This almost mathematical approach to writing only gets worse the more strenuous the curriculum is, as I specifically recall in my International Baccalaureate Literature and Composition class. The method was so ludicrously precise, that we were taught every single thing we could and couldn’t do, from the exact progression of sentences, to how we were supposed to annotate text. I’m not kidding when I say that our teacher taught us exactly how we were supposed to notate our tests; he required us to underline certain portions or circle certain portions depending on what significance it had upon our argument.

Of course, this isn’t to say that we, as writers, should completely throw off the oppressive shackles of regulation and embrace chaotic writing. Unless your message or style is specifically focused on chaos, writing requires and is expected to flow in a certain way most of the time out of necessity. Even in creative writing, your work must be orderly so that your reader can easily understand you. After all, what good is a message if it isn’t received by its expected audience? And though I have yet to encounter a job so rigidly precise as my IB courses, certain employers may require you to adhere to a certain format if you write articles for them, because society has grown up learning these techniques, making it even easier to understand, even if it hampers your creative process.

But, again, I feel like this rigid structure has harmed a generation of creative writers in an age where the written word is losing its value. When I’m writing, I keep drifting back into this dull format of writing, and I have to constantly change the structure so that I don’t get bored with my own work. If I’m bored writing it, what is that suggesting for my audience? Nothing good, that’s for sure. Fewer and fewer people look to writing as a profession, and so none of them bother to really learn to write past their dull English lectures, confident that it, along with most of the other things they learn in high school, are not going to affect their lives afterwards. And so, thanks to initiatives like No Child Left Behind or the FCAT, which force teachers to teach for a test rather than impart useful knowledge unto their pupils, I find myself trying to distance myself from predictability with an annoying consistency. The balance between creativity and practicality has been shifted, and I always hope that the scales may soon swing in the other direction.