I was writing something else, and I decided to stop in the middle to rant about limitations I perceive in my education. Throughout high school and college, I was taught to produce a very specific type of writing; I was taught to write expository or argumentative papers arguing a specific point to an impartial observer. The papers averaged about 7 pages in length, very rarely longer than 15 pages or shorter than 3. When I think back on this education, I remember being taught very specific things about how to organize paragraph contents and where to place paragraphs of specific type. I feel like this education could easily produce someone who is able to robotically produce cogent, readable writing in this format and fail miserably at writing anything else. I think I have had some success breaking out of this trap, but I still suffer from a sort of generalized confusion when I try to write outside of the 7 page expo. / argu. box. When I write well outside of it I often do it by randomly perturbing my structure and style until I randomly produce something I enjoy as a reader.
I am a big hip hop fan, and I listen to a lot of artists that are not college or even high school graduates. At the same time, I often have the feeling that I am experiencing real visionary creativity of a nature I find it difficult to see someone of my background producing. I wonder what the artistic cost of formal education is; in particular I wonder what it costs to make that formal education conform to a uniform standard. I know there are ways of thinking that society needs to produce in its citizens in order to function, and that education is the way to produce them. However, I also feel that there has to be a price, and I wonder what it is. What kinds of creative doors are we closing?
What do you think?
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As I began my formal education at the college level in physics I also began an informal education in drumming and percussion. To this day I have not had one lesson in drums but many in math and science, although in my mind math and physics are to science what percussion and drumming are to music. So maybe I have had some education in drums. I think that in some ways formal education does hinder creativity because it causes people to compartmentalize their knowledge. Why not combine math and short stories or impressionistic painting with engineering. You can certainly come up with an interesting combination of subjects to create some art form, but I think that people get so caught up in their own area that sometimes it's hard for them to crossover and combine. I found that with drumming, after four years of playing by myself, my drumming has become some sort of linear combination of many styles, anything from jazz to metal or any other style I found myself listening to. When I watch drummers on YouTube (something I am addicted to now), I find that most drummers are always very confined to their one particular style (which they are great at), and I think this has to do with their formal training in drums. I don’t want to sound like I am against formal training in a subject. It has many advantages, efficiency being one of them. There are techniques in drumming I’m sure I would have learned immediately if I were to have taken lessons, but instead it took me a while to realize some things, but I also found this process more fun because I wasn’t focusing on repetitive practice but more on an overall sound.
I think the best part about a formal education is that it forces you to learn things that you probably wouldn’t on your own because they are so tedious and complicated. The best part of informal training is that you have more of a blank slate which is conducive to creativity in style.
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