Creative writing is a facet of schooling that is disappearing more and more. This lack of creative writing can be attributed to a relatively small pool of reasons. The predominant reason, however, is the lack of desire from students.
Most every student I have spoken to about the subject has either shrugged it off or is generally uninterested, which alarms me. Instead of expressing themselves in a creative or proactive way, students are opting to work only within the parameters specified by a teacher.
In years past the youth had a vivid imagination creating amazing and unique worlds, characters, and thoughts. Now with the dawn of the digital age, the age of imagination is slowly dying, I would not be the first to say we are a generation enslaved by our “smart” phones.
With this stagnation of imagination in schools and in students, where are we as a society going to go to get that next revolutionary invention? Most likely we will not revolutionize anything in this generation. This all ties back to a lack of creativity in schools. By the inclusion of creative writing in a writing curriculum we force students to think intelligently about a subject and to create something amazing.
The form of the writing in itself is unimportant. Poetry, short stories, or whatever the form is will force a student to think for themselves. This sort of stimulus could potentially shock our culture and make students put down their phones, turn off the gadget and begin thinking for themselves. Who knows, maybe the next great creative mind is in our midst.
“There was no need for a term like ‘magical thinking’ in the Golden Age of Man…there was only genuine everyday magic and mysticism. Children were not mocked or scolded in those days for singing to the rain or talking to the wind.”―Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential To Your True Destiny