mcas talk

today, a couple of the kids i work with had to take the english portion of the mcas, the standardized test the state of ma. gives that high school students need to pass in order to graduate. they were supposed to write a composition that asked them about a character they have read about in a book. nolan proceeded to invent a character. the character's name was nolan, and he was from outer space. somehow, the character ends up as a soldier fighting in the nazi army during world war two. the teacher told him he had to stop, for he would "fail" if he didn't answer the question the way he was supposed to.
i ask you, what kind of an education are we giving our youth when we are forced, as teachers, to discourage them from using their creativity and their imagination? isn't the ability to create from scratch an idea that has not existed until the moment you created it, more relevant than the ability to regurgitate information that already exists?
and then, it hits you. the system doesn't want young people to think, to imagine, to be creative, to form new things which did not exist before they sat down and made them up. they want us to think that what already exists is good enough, that all we need to do is use what is there, to memorize that which is, to become what others have already became.
nolan would have failed. nolan would have been wrong. he wanted to do it his own way. he didn't want to do what they were asking. therefore, nolan must be an idiot, a crazy, a loser. why would anyone want to do something unique? why would anyone want to create a character? creativity is for others. we can pay 10 dollars for a movie to see others be creative. we can spend 15 dollars on a cd to hear others be creative. we can go to a concert, to a museum, to an art show, to see and hear and watch the creativity of others. but no, we must not be creative in this moment, the only moment that exists. we must not live a life of agency, of choice, of creativity.
we must get an education. we must pass high school.
we must slowly die.