University vs. Creativity

I watched an episode of Apprentice 3 while having dinner tonight. Again, the “book smart” team lost to “street smart” team. “Book smart” is a team which all the members are graduated from top universities. Whereas “street smart” members only graduate from high school but also done a lot outstanding business. Not surprise to me, the income of “street smart” is THREE times more than “book smart” according to their profile. One “book smart” member commended : we are pretty smart, but just need a little bit street smart. They also realised their disadvantage at the beginning – tend to over analyse everything before doing it. Whereas “street smart” just came out of an idea quickly and ‘just do it’!

After watching the show, I once again asked myself the question: Is university a place to destroy creativity and entrepreneurship of students? Ok, I think some people might start saying I’m crazy now. But when I was writing my dissertation this afternoon, my brain was alwaya surrounded by those questions like “Is there enough evident to support my argument?”, “Is my words big enough (academic enough) to impress markers?”, or “Do I need to add more references?” etc. I understand the important of bibliography and citing, but those concerns always stop me from writing down my ideas. Because I was educated that academic evident are required to use to support my ideas.

University teach people things that are already done by other people, but hardly let you to explore the idea that is out of the box. University itself is the box, in a sense. When I was small I like to read Doraemon, because you never know what will come out from that pocket. Sometimes I even imaged things that I want to have in future and draw them down. But started from my first day in school, I have to follow rules and sometimes all of them don’t make any sense. I was told to follow, otherwise will get punishment. So I’ve been very careful all the way until now, until this afternoon when I wanted to write down sometimes, those “rule questions” flew inside my mind and I just can’t come out any new ideas.

A lot of successful enterprises are started from university, some of them are very creative, like Google and facebook. But none of them are through a university project or assignment, rather, Mark dropped out university after facebook was launched, and Google was started as a garage project. Well, a lot people wish to be like them, but only few can actually achieve it, the rest of them are like me, getting headache with essays.

I remember a conversation with James one day about his English exam. His teacher told him that he can’t write essays like this or like that, but he insisted to write on his own way, the teacher gave up and let him do whatever he want to do. And the end, he got a A.

Ps. I am not supposed to have time to write this post according the “time management rule” I set to myself. But I know if I don’t write them down I will never do. So screw the “rules”!

Tagged as: Creativity, Education, The-Apprentice