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You go to school every day and do the same thing and there never really is any disruption to your schedule. This is because the American education system is made to run like an assembly line. You come into school, you get ready, you listen to announcements, and then you go and work for several hours going from one classroom to another learning facts that are important, but not nearly as important as creativity or ingenuity.

While it is definitely important for people to know how to read and write in the professional world (no matter what career choice), there are also so many other important aspects of life that students need to learn for the real world.

American History teacher Mr. Robert McMinn expressed his views on the matter. He stated, “We should be creating whole students, citizens, not little worker bees, and if we are doing that then we are crushing creativity. To improve on this we could change the focus of schools.

“Why do we have to hold students in one place for eight hours five days a week when certain students could already be out in the work force? School, right now, is basically a pre-institution prison. Also, not a lot of kids are here for education. They’re here to see their friends, to socialize, for athletics, so if we put more focus on education we could definitely improve the current education system.”

With that said, do you think the educational system we have now is killing creativity and entrepreneurship? According to an article called “How America’s Education Model Is Killing Creativity and Entrepreneurship,” a study conducted by Kyung Hee Kim, Professor of Education at the College of William and Mary, revealed that children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, and much more.

The current model of education in the United States is stifling the creative soul of our children. While this is troubling for a variety of reasons, it also has significant economic consequences for the future of our country. America has long been unique because of its remarkable ingenuity, innovative capacity and entrepreneurial spirit. Yet over the last few decades, we have witnessed both a steady decline in the number of startups, as well as an increasing number of studies that suggest America’s education model fails to promote the kind of creativity, risk-taking, and problem solving skills necessary for entrepreneurship, and for a world and labor market that is in the midst of profound transformation. These are very worrisome trends. – Kyung Hee Kim

This is happening because it partly relates to the psychology of social conformity that generally increases with age and enhanced social awareness, and that the current school models were originally designed to support industrialization.

Senior Rachel Harris stated, “I definitely feel like they should change the current school model to involve more creativity, but at the same time I feel like it would be difficult for people to adjust to the change because it has been around for so long.”