Keeping Creative Writing Alive

Creative Writing is a subject that isn’t touch upon by a lot of school in the nation, due to all the budget cuts in school funding. Schools throughout the nation have to cut down on any extracurricular activities such as creative writing. Gerald Richards the national chief executive said the following are main subjects’ schools focus on primarily; math, science, technology, and engineering. GERALD RICHARDS: "I think there is much more of a focus on science, technology, engineering and math. There's a lot of a focus on testing and a lot of the teaching that's going on in schools is focusing on the test and passing the test rather than thinking about how do we get kids to think."

He emphasize on how the students are just learning how to take tests and passing them, which is pretty sad because of the lack of creativity can have the students become like drones in society. If we don’t want the students to become robotic, then we need to find ways to incorporate creativity into the mix.

            Creative writing and art needs to be established as one of the main subjects in the school’s standard curriculum, because kids these days don’t have the creativity they should have for future occupations. Creative writing and art is essential to a lot of jobs out there in the market. If you don’t have the ability to write creatively, then that means you won’t have the ability to think creatively. Creativity doesn’t only lie within writing and art; creativity can spark from technology as well. Think about any Apple products. Do you think the IPod or the IPhone was created overnight? No! It took Steve Jobs and the Apple organization years to think of these innovative products. So we can see that you can find creativity everywhere, but creativity has to start from some place.

            That some place is at school, because that artwork or writing can be the pathway for a young adolescent to become a famous artist, poet, or even CEO of a billion dollar company. Although creativity should be a part of the school curriculum, the school funding is not support it. So instead of it being a lost at school there are other places students can express their creativity. There is a place in San Francisco, Mission district that is meant to give the students the ability to express and create stories, poems, and artwork. This place is called 826, because it is located at 826 Valencia Street. It’s not your ordinary tutor, where people help you with your reading, writing, and math. It’s a place where students can become imaginative and become as creative as they want to be. This is a facility that creates confidence to all the students who go there and participate.

One of the students in San Francisco is Sofia Marquez.

SOFIA MARQUEZ: "I get to use my imagination -- that's why I like writing."

So, we should find ways to incorporate creativity into the school system, because we want the students and children to become less like robots and more like creative beings.