Does School Murder Creativity?

This morning I woke up with a throbbing headache, and a voice in my head telling me to stay in bed. When my mother came into my bedroom, I quickly expressed to her how terrible I was feeling. She quickly called the doctor and New Trier, to affirm them of my absence. I fell asleep as she did this. An hour or two later I woke up (again) to eat breakfest, and as usual I had no idea what to watch on my apple TV. I noticed a new "Ted" app had appeared. After a quick browse through the app I started watching a twenty minute video called: "Does School Kill Creativity?". Throughout the video a popular educator speaks about education throughout the course of history. As he does this he explains that the necessity of education was brought up in the industrial area. Pre and industrial age, people have been taught how to properly function and behave for their certain jobs. But in our modern day, A.K.A. The Information Age, this is no longer the most important quality.

In our modern day people succeed daily, with out without college. Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, are just two of the world's most popular examples of college dropouts who become destined for success. These men may have been the first examples of success without school, but they are certainly not the last. As years go by, we hear stories of countless others succeeding without a full college education. In fact speaking as a teenager, it is considered significantly more fashionable to create a successful lifestyle straight out of high school. Don't get me wrong--- I desire an educated, bright mind. With that being said, I do desire success. And as many before me, I desire that success as quick as I can get it. Yet in our era I feel as if school is actually slowing down my ability to succeed, by murdering my creativity. Allow me to explain. Every year school ends around the second week of June. After a few days of relaxing I notice my mindset starts to change. I start thinking about what I desire for myself, what I want in my life, and in general become a happy guy. Summer allows me to shy away from the boring never ending school grind. Summer allows me to create accomplishable ideas instead of spending time memorizing pointless flash cards. Just this past summer, I came up with an inconceivable idea.  I came up with a revolutionary idea for an App called "P+lus", and submitted into a contest sponsored by Uber.

There were 5,000 entries but only 10 made it into the "UberVenture" program. Think "Shark Tank" but with the ability to order an Uber, with a venture capitalist investor inside of it. For a short four hours, I was waiting for an Uber to show up with an investor that I could pitch my idea to.  No investor ever showed up, to any of the ten contest finalists. It was later revealed that the whole contest was a giant publicity stunt ran by Uber. Regardless, I didn't care, as I had finally put together a 12 page proposal for my app. The ability to not be worried by the constant stress that school places on me, allowed me think in a creative way. Unfortunately the truth in my reality is that school kills creativity, but that is a small price to pay for the power, and intelligence which my highschool provides.

If you'd like to swatch the Ted Talk you can here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en