“You’re going to do it my way.”
And that is what’s wrong with the entire education system in the United States.
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, that was probably the worst year of my life. There are plenty of adults I know now that can’t write half as well as I did then. 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 got a check mark for not being as neat and beautiful as she thought I should be. But who is to tell an eight-year old that her hand writing is bad. That the loops at the ends of her a’s are wrong, after all she’s just being creative.
Every year the teachers give the whole “poetry is about being creative and expressing how you feel” speech.
Well do you want to know how I really feel. I feel like that unit is a load of crap. Because right after they tell you all about that, 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.
And 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 “contrastment”. I’ll distemper you, too bad I don’t know what that means because I didn’t pay attention in your class.
And 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 is supposed to be above you.
There’s a problem with education. It’s that teachers have been taught the same thing they teach us without trying to change a thing.
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