All in all, you're just another brick in the wall.

This morning I took the ACT test. Five hours straight of giving an administration a chance to analyze my mind by answering questions irrelevant to anything I will ever do. Not that it's supposed to be relevant, but still. It's boring. It isn't like a regular test in school in which you feel a sigh of relief from the knowledge, regardless of how well you think you did, that you at least have the matter of that test at rest (rhyme!) and that you will not need to worry about the information at all until the exam. The ACT is not so forgiving. The stress is multiplied when I'm told that whatever college I go to will be affected by the score, and doubled with the knowledge that (regardless of the score) I will be taking it again.

The education system undermines creativity. Sir Ken Robinson said at his TED talk that an enormous aspect of creativity is the ability to allow yourself to make mistakes. The logic behind this is simple enough. The creative minds (not exclusive to the arts) really belong to those who excel in the world; to the ones who are creative enough to rearrange the current pieces of the systems and begin something new. Paul Allen and Bill Gates took what was available and created the Windows operating system, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose created websites that would almost revolutionize the international human network, and the Wal-Mart guy made Wal-Mart.

So why are we taught to be terrified of making mistakes? There is no questioning that the people listed above relied on mistakes and serendipity. Despite this, we are told that mistakes could ruin us. We are educated out of our creativity, sentencing the majority to jobs that have no connection to any passion (passion that often goes undiscovered, too).

Gillian Lynne underperformed in school. She probably had what today would be called ADHD. Her mother brought her to a psychologist, who told her to immediately bring Lynne out of normal schooling and enroll her in a dance school. Gillian Lynne eventually became internationally known for designing the choreography of acts such as Cats and Phantom of the Opera. Today, they would have thrown her on some medication and told her to sit down like everyone else.

As my freshman math teacher pointed out, "When you make mistakes, people die." To me, it's obvious that everyone has an enormous amount of creativity that only needs an outlet. Once the correct outlet is discovered, mistakes must be allowed.

"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. "
-Pablo Picasso