You walk into class, sit down, write answers, turn in papers, and then receive a grade. These grades are all based on whether your answer was correct; correct according to a rubric that puts your work into little boxes. There are few exceptions to these answers, usually relying on the teacher’s discretion. Are schools killing students’ creativity? The answer is yes.

Every student is expected to sit still in a desk for seven plus hours for five days a week filling in word blanks and circling letters. Then when we arrive home, we do hours more of homework. Where does our creativity come out in these situations? We are not allowed to paint on our math homework, dance around the science classroom to demonstrate energy and movement, or even share our english papers without being criticized on our ideas.

As author and educator, Sir Ken Robinson states, “There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics.” And this goes for all creative subjects. We have the “core” classes, being mathematics, science, english and history, above all creative classes such as dance, art, music, and much more. Yet these creative classes are those that most students enjoy the most, so why aren’t we teaching through more creative lesson plans?

Students are confined in this box; the box of right answers. If you leave the box, you are scratched out with a red pen and your overall value is degraded. This is why schools are killing creativity. They do not allow each individual student to veer away from the cookie-cutter book telling us all to be the same.