We blame society and the media for what’s wrong with our culture; however, a big portion needs to go to schools. Schools label people on their ability to take a standardized test. For example, you have to take one just to get into college. These labels stick with people. Who comes up with these labels? Maybe instead of thinking that a bad grade means that person is dumb, it means they’re creative and have trouble focusing in class. Labeling them as stupid and forcing them to throw creativity away is not right.

In high school, you sit in a square room, at a square desk, looking at a square board as some teacher throws facts at you. College is not any better. You sit in class as the teacher lectures about psychology, or a faculty member gives a freshman seminar about being a successful student at school (which is really just repeating things we have already heard a thousand times). I want to be in the world putting skills into practice. Rather than testing how well I can write geometric proofs, why not teach me how to buy a house? Pay bills? Be a productive member of society? My most favorite class that I have taken was creative writing; I’ve learned to write different styles, enjoy writing and take some pride in my work, much more so than in any class I’d ever taken before. The environment was the opposite of a traditional classroom. We were shown, not told. It was, "This is how you see it in life," not "Here’s a packet, now read it."

The problem is this: if everyone is judged on the same scale, and then diminished by the same scale, where are the creative ones to challenge us? Because of the music and art appreciation class that I took, I can look at a piece of art and say, “Look at the atmospheric perspective and saturation used by the artist to draw my attention to a focus point," and appreciate what the artist was trying to say. Yet schools push science and technology, and though they are important, where is the creativity? For thousands of years, humans used creativity for science. The creative thoughts of Galileo and Newton set the base for modern-day physics. They used their imaginations to figure things out and developed experiments to prove it. Now, schools teach that we should solve it one way and then we get stuck because we can not see outside of the blinders.

If only we stopped cutting programs that could solve this. The cutting of music and art programs and the cutting of sports is detrimental to our society. Students use these as escapes from school and poor home situations. Think about that for a second. The things that are escapes for students — sports, music and art, all healthy stress relievers — are being taken away and then the students are being forced more into the classes they hate or a home life that sucks. Why? So we can advance society? All it does is cause them to find new relievers in drugs, alcohol and gangs. The most advancement society typically has is when a creative person looks at a problem and says “I wonder if…”