Why Don’t American Schools Value Creativity?

High school almost crushed my dream of being a writer. Now, as an educator, I’m trying to be the teacher I never had.

This is Bell Ringers, a column by Erin Crosby-Eckstine about the state of contemporary education.

I wrote my first, and only, short story in the ninth grade.

It was an extra-credit project assigned as part of our short story unit. I took it on less because I really cared about writing and more because I was an overachiever. That was the culture of my all-girls prep school, after all: Create to achieve, not to enjoy.

We’d already read the greatest hits of high school short fiction: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Each story was grim and therefore intriguing to me, an angst-ridden freshman. I was deep in my hormones and sought out every melancholic young adult novel I could get my hands on. When I sat down at my clunky desktop PC to draft the story, I knew I wanted to write something sad. Something that tapped into the loneliness and confusion that plagued the women in the stories I’d read—the same loneliness and confusion I saw in myself. I put in my earbuds, turned on Plans by Death Cab for Cutie, and started to type.

The protagonist was the kind of grown-up I thought emanated coolness; a twenty-something magazine editor who ordered lattes every day and lived in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park. She was the type who went to underground concerts and kissed boys who looked like Craig Manning from Degrassi. The story was written in a stream-of-consciousness style (although I didn’t know that term at the time), examining this Carrie Bradshaw–esque woman’s insidious loneliness as she realized that, despite having it all, no one in her life could remember her birthday. My concept of sorrow at the time was, admittedly, small.

I got an A-plus on the story. I was excited; I’d always been a good student, but the invisible A-minus type. My grades were good enough to keep me off my teachers’ radars but never great enough to earn me any special affection. My teacher’s feedback on the depth and inventiveness of my writing stuck with me more than any other grade I’d received. They were the first comments I remember from my high school years that made me feel truly, and uniquely, good at something.

What surprised me most about writing was that I actually liked doing it. As a kid, I’d written books on stapled copy paper in my grandparents’ office, but puberty seemed to be the line demarcating my literary confidence. As a teenager, I was riddled with anxiety. I always seemed to feel the tick of a clock in my veins, noting the seconds that brought me closer to something I feared: waking up for school, a geometry test, walking down the hallway past the girls who bullied me. But, when I wrote that story, I lost myself in fantasy and time bent to my will.

The problem of being a fourteen-year-old girl is that your self-esteem is fickle. Even though I enjoyed it, writing for the sake of it felt delusional. Who was I to believe I would ever be able to create something other people might enjoy? It didn’t help that I’d only read works by two Black authors in school, one of which spent the majority of his book talking about yams, infanticide, and marital abuse. Schoolwork gave me an excuse to indulge myself, to say I was doing it for the grade—not because I liked it or believed I could be good.

Even though I enjoyed it, writing for the sake of it felt delusional.

I believe now that American schooling is a systemic tool of capitalism and white supremacy, but at fourteen, I already knew traditional schooling didn’t make space for creativity. What I had yet to learn was how insidiously and expertly schools worked to strip children of their abilities to create.

*

The creative assignments stopped after ninth grade. The College Board, the invisible hand of American higher education, did not value creativity on their rubrics for AP classes; therefore, my school did not either. I eventually stopped reading for fun as well, too busy trying to decipher Paradise Lost and count calories to keep up with my favorite hobby. Besides, my writing would never qualify for any awards or accolades to put on my college applications. By graduation, I’d buried my authorial ambitions below layers of responsibility, doubt, and anxiety.

I tried to write again in college, drafting opening paragraphs that I left to die in my Google Drive, while conveniently missing the sign-up dates for every creative writing class the school offered. Around that time, I dated a fellow aspiring writer. If I couldn’t explore my own imagination, at least I could be proximate to someone else’s. He insisted he was going to become the next Calvino or Coetzee and change American fiction. He would ditch important events with me to focus on his work, yelled at me for asking to spend time together when he was writing, and insisted that my anger at him for publishing a piece about missing his ex-girlfriend was an attack on his creativity. He told me I wasn’t ambitious enough, that being unsure of what I wanted made me attractive, that the stories I started were no good. I believed him. I gave up on my ideas and my sense of self as a creative person. He was a white man whose work you could read online, the type of writer I’d spent my whole educational career being told was important. How could I disagree?

I did come back to writing, of course, after I got out of predominantly white institutions and away from my self-righteous, Medium-self–published ex. After reading outside the required book lists brought me to Zadie Smith, Jesmyn Ward, and Toni Morrison, who let me see women like myself as writers. After therapy and family made me feel like my imagination could be worth something.

It should not be this hard for young women to believe they can create. What would have happened if, instead of neglect and dismissal, my interest in writing had been tended by the educators in my life? What if, by the time I met that toxic ex, my confidence in my creativity was strong enough to withstand his arrogance and jealousy? And more importantly, why wasn’t my creativity—or that of any of my peers—nourished?

*

I ended up becoming a ninth-grade English teacher. People often ask me how I can possibly tolerate spending my day around freshmen students. While the answer is that I genuinely love spending time with teenagers, the deeper reason is that I know what a turning point that year was for my own self-esteem, literacy, and creativity.

I started working in education under the shadow of the Common Core, just as the last embers of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act burnt out. Under the new initiative, STEM teachers got the majority of the funding and humanities and literacy classes were sidelined. Arguments percolated throughout the English department about what the purpose of our job even was, or if we’d all be better off just teaching students how to read a newspaper and write a résumé instead of bothering with literature and theater. Creativity in schools was under attack, and graduate school had made it clear to me that the path to long-term success as an English teacher would be how well I could adhere to educational standards.

By the end of grad school, I had nearly memorized the Common Core for my grade level: Students must write arguments to support claims, students must establish and maintain a formal style, students must supply evidence. Writing was meant to be analytical, simplified and routinized until it became as measurable as any algebra equation. I began to notice that all education in America worked this way: It was about finding, memorizing, and following patterns. Use the order of operations to solve the equation. Look for the repeating motif of green lights in Gatsby. Memorize the steps of mitosis. My job was to take those standards and sneak them into something engaging enough to keep tenth graders off their phones for forty-five minutes, like hiding a pet’s medicine in peanut butter.

I began to notice that all education in America worked this way: It was about finding, memorizing, and following patterns.

Creative projects were relegated to the odd gaps in a year: between state tests, the day before a break, the last week of school. My graduate professors taught me that the path to keeping fiction in the curriculum was to approach it like relics from the past meant to be decoded and dropped, rather than as works of art meant to inspire imagination. Creative writing was filler; argumentative writing was key.

Once I got comfortable teaching, I started to experiment with sneaking in more creative writing opportunities. At first it was just one project: Students were assigned to write an adaptation of one of the myths we’d read in that unit. When I described the project, they responded with blank stares.

“I don’t know how to start this,” many of them said.

“Start it how you’d like; it’s your story.”

“But I don’t know how to start something if you don’t tell me how.”

I nudged my students along with some helpful strategies and eventually got the majority of them writing something. Some students wrote stories that, with a bit of finessing, could easily land in a literary magazine. Others wrote a few sentences and then gave up. The majority told me they’d loved giving writing a try, even if it was hard.

By the time students are fifteen, only about 10 percent of them demonstrate any signs of divergent thinking, or the ability to think outside of linear patterns. In the case of creative writing, this means it can be harder for high school students to create something organically their own. While this in and of itself is damaging, a recent study on divergent thinking in connection to teenagers’ Covid-induced anxiety found that divergent thinking was one of the greatest facilitators of self-efficacy and one of the best ways for students to combat depression and other mental health issues.

The next year, I cut back on creative projects in favor of test prep requested by the administration, but I snuck more creative writing back in during Covid remote learning. Students similarly froze at having so much leeway, but many of them eventually pulled together something cohesive. By then, I’d taken some writing workshops, so I worked to give each student feedback the same way I would one of my peers. The assignments not only yielded beautiful projects, but many of my students now had new self-concepts as writers.

At first, I hadn’t thought much about why students struggle so much to create. I wrote it off as writer’s block or low confidence and kept creative writing as mostly filler in the cracks of my curriculum. I didn’t consider that keeping teenagers from creative work might be intentional.

Last summer, I came across a TikTok by activist Imani Barbarin, in which she states that “one of the most difficult things to recognize about white supremacy is that it robs us of our imagination.”

After I heard it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the blank stares I’d received from every group of students I’d assigned a creative project. Or how comprehensively my own last years of high school had beaten the creative impulse out of me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how naturally we create early in our school tenures and how much we struggle to create outside of a prescribed box by the end.

Creativity isn’t simply about making something enjoyable, or even shareable. It is about strengthening the synapses in the brain to allow it to think in nonlinear ways. By denying students creative opportunities, schools deprive students of the ability to imagine concepts or ideas outside of the ones they are presented. Instead, the existing curriculum forces students’ thinking into a preset track formed by capitalistic and racist forces: teaching curriculum by predominantly white writers, managing linguistic variations by measuring “academic language,” demanding a particular organization for an argument to be recognized as valid.

If teenagers, particularly those of color, can’t imagine how to write a character in a story, how can they conceive of ways to upend the greater powers that oppress them? The exclusion of creative writing in schools isn’t just a problem for the students themselves, but for our society at large. Humanity is facing problems far greater than any we’ve ever solved—climate change, global pandemics, systemic racism. Capitalism and white supremacy, the bedfellows that control essentially all aspects of Western culture, are actively invested in average people not having the creative capacity to imagine a world different than the one we live in, or create solutions that dismantle the structures that oppress us.

Creativity in schools isn’t filler—it may actually be the only thing that matters.

*

I don’t claim to have much power in this world, but I am lucky enough to work with young people every day. I decided that if I really want to help dismantle white supremacy and capitalism, I have to start sticking my neck out and trying things that don’t fit into the prescribed standards and rubrics. This year, I chucked much of my existing curriculum and devoted every Friday to creativity. For two Fridays a month, we read anything we want, and for the other two, we write whatever we want. The first creative writing Friday, my students stared at me with blank faces. There were a lot of questions.

“I can write about anything I want?”

“Yes, whatever you feel like. The prompts are there if you need a start, but you don’t have to write about them,” I answered.

“What if I want to write a character in space, even though we didn’t read anything about space?”

“That sounds cool! You should do it.”

“What if my character curses? Or does something violent?”

“Okay with me—you’re the author.”

“So you’ll really let us write about anything?”

“Pretty much.”

By the next Friday, the students begged me to let them keep working on their stories. While I did make them read their chosen books instead, I couldn’t help but smile when I overheard a student mutter in frustration, “I wish every Friday was creative writing Friday.”