An Art School Education

After Monday’s class, I kept thinking about the mainstream education in America. The video shown had a huge impact on me throughout the day and I literally sent the link t most of my art school friends. I attended public school from the age of six till I was thirteen in a small, privileged town way up north in Michigan. There I was the only foreign student and was teased endlessly for wearing scent that blushed my wrists (French women start prepping the young girls with perfume from a very early age). Along with constantly being reminded that I did not fit in with my peers, I was put in the slower level reading classes because the teachers were concerned that I was not at the normal level. (Not once did they consider the fact that I was bilingual –French & English- could have an influence on this little reading “problem”). I went through the system without doing much actual work, but did the bare minimum to not be noticed by my teachers. When I was thirteen, I got extremely sick and missed three months of school, and after returning to school I never did much work to catch up, yet managed to get by with decent grades. This attitude of doing the bare minimum is one that most students in my town also adopted, and the teachers never pushed us to change this sort of “ideal.” After my English professor was gone for a week, a substitute teacher noticed that I was not following with the rest of the class, and instead spent my time writing short little stories. She took my stories away and read it, and told me to meet her after class. She then gave me an exam and concluded that I was at least four years ahead of my peers, which it wasn’t because I was simply lazy, but because I was bored, I needed to be stimulated. She told me about the boarding art high school just an hour away. After that I applied and got in. It was in this school that I progressed the most. Interlochen was highly selective, only accepting the most passionate and devoted young artists. Though once there we learned we learned that having our noses in the books would not be enough to do well in the school. My workload was overwhelming, reading only the finest of poets and fiction writers- pulled three all-nighters a week was fairly normal and my professors stimulated me by having me to write poem after poem. I didn’t have any real requirements other than take a certain number of classes. The classes where I learned most from where the ones where there were no tests or essays, simply I read plenty of books and we engaged in class discussions. Sometime we would go into the river and fly fish, or canoe while reading the poems outside, and at other times one professor especially thought we needed to get in touch with our wild selves to fully comprehend certain texts, and so we burned sage, drummed and ran through the woods and howled at the moon. I felt simply brilliant, and had plenty of collaborative and creative ideas. Coming to Carnegie Mellon has been a huge and somewhat difficult adjustment. I go to every class, I spend hours doing of homework, overloading, yet I don’t think I’ve ever felt so bored and terribly down that I am not being intellectually stimulated. I’m not being pushed in my creativity, and instead of progressing and being challenged I find myself regressing. Odd concept since the goal of higher education is to be challenged and stimulated not left feeling burnt out and completely bored. I think that there needs to be other ways, other than just the traditional schooling method that stimulate certain people, who do not fit the social norms of education.