I was watching a video on plagiarism by Zoe Bee, and about halfway trough (at 31:23 according to YouTube’s transcript) she said the following
“Writing is hard, I know it is, and I think a lot of plagiarism can be traced back to bad writing education.”
And those words I underlined really got me thinking. Not about the subject of the video, but the kind of writing education I received. And from there I started thinking about my education in general and how it made sure to make me hate being curious and creative.
Before I go any further, however, yes, I know I’m not breaking any ground, many people who are far smarter than me have talked about this before countless times (such as Zoe Bee in her video titled “Grading is a Scam”, or countless other students and teachers).
The point of this article is to lay out the specific ways I’ve been fucked by the education system I’ve been a part of, with all its poorly laid out structures, decades of performative change that don’t actually improve anything but make it impossible for teachers and students to even adapt to the system and try to make things almost work within it.
How essays should (not) be made
When told about how an essay should be written, we weren’t taught how to structure the arguments we were making, or the points to support those arguments, instead we were given some formal definitions and points. We always had to start essay with a very strict definition of whatever we were arguing for, then look for evidence for two of a handful of canned points, then finish by repeating the definition at the start, but prefixed by “In conclusion”.
If you’re an experienced (or even amateur) essayist who cares about the craft, you’re probably dying inside hearing all of that. You might feel that way even if you couldn’t care less about writing but enjoy reading people’s essays from time to time (which I’m assuming you do if you’re reading this).
But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend you don’t see what’s wrong with that. Well, I’ll tell you!
THAT’S NOT HOW ESSAYS WORK
Not good ones, anyway.
Fundamentally, essays are a means to convey ones thoughts on a subject matter. Maybe you want to argue for or against something, maybe you want to write a critique of a book, movie, or video game. It’s a medium to express your ideas on a subject, to get into the nitty-gritty of something you have thoughts on.
What I and everyone else going trough the same education system got instead was arguing why thing is thing using two canned arguments that we could rarely even come up with ourselves, because we were given a list of approved arguments to begin with. I’m no expert on any sort of writing, quite far from it, but even with my admittedly amateurish writing skills I can confidently say that this isn’t how you teach students to write good essays, it’s how you teach people to be obedient NPCs with canned talking points and no spark of curiosity or creativity.
I can understand why you might want to start with canned arguments for the first couple so you can focus on the structure of how you say things instead of what’s being said, but in 8 years of essay writing I’ve done in school, I can only think of a single time when we got anything other than canned points.
Once we were given a special assignment: take a character from a work of Ion Luca Caragiale and analyse it. Still had some restrictions, but it was an assignment that let us actually think.
What does this character stand for?
Why do they act the way they act?
It was actually engaging, we got to think for ourselves and express our thoughts on the subject, I even ended up touching on political subjects in that essay (not that it was avoidable given the writer, I.L. Caragiale did plenty of political and social commentary in his works) and it was great, my thoughts were of course very uninformed given my age and the fact this was the first time I got to say what I think, but it felt great to work on it nonetheless.
Too bad it was the only time that would happen…
From approved points to someone else’s words
What I talked about above? That was middle school. High school upgraded that to not even being allowed to phrase the approved points ourselves. How so? We were just given 10 page long essays from the teacher that we had to memorise word for word. No rephrasing. No inserting our own points. No deviances whatsoever.
I’d go in more detail about this, but there’s really nothing else to say. This wasn’t engaging, it wasn’t fun, it was just tiresome and stressful. Add to that the fact the books the essays were about were pretty bad in the first place (and we were forced to read them in a pretty short time) and you have a perfect recipe for outright hating books, essays, and any other sort of creative writing.
Realising the damage
As mentioned above, all of that stuff can lead to people hating writing as a whole, and it most definitely did that to me. I couldn’t stand the idea of reading anything. But did I really hate reading, or did I hate the specific reading I had to do for high school. Well, let’s just say that I spent a week reading every major path in Katawa Shoujo (and it’s no short visual novel), and later spent months keeping up with the Domestic Girlfriend manga and forgoing sleep in favour of “just one more chapter” (and we all know how that goes).
Clearly I didn’t hate reading books, and I honestly quite enjoy writing these essays on the blog as well (as mediocre as they are). I like a good story, I like obsessing over the details of a good story, I’ve obsessed plenty in private chats with friends over Elder Scrolls lore.
What I hated was what school forced on me: dry stories, and no freedom to analyse them as I saw things. I had to use someone else’s ideas and later words to describe things I hated.
How do you fix things?
As I said in the beginning, far smarter people have already gone over how one could fix stuff like this, but here are some points from someone who suffered that broken system: give students variety and modern books to go over, and let them phrase their own thoughts in their own words for essays. Will this solve everything? Not by a long shot, but it’s a beginning, and it would’ve definitely helped prevent me from hating a medium I’m now quite fond of.
PS: Oh, and if my Romanian teacher from high school somehow reads this: you made it even worse than it had to be, I do not respect you, I hope we never cross paths again.
(Romanian teacher from middle school was great tho)