As I’ve said in class, I currently resigned from work. After graduating in 2007, I basically took the summer off then started working immediately after that. I’ve been with the company for two years and 11 months, a pretty long period, I think, because some of my friends have worked for two, three, even four companies in the same period. No, I’m not going to waste bandwidth deciding if it encouraged or discouraged creativity, I’m just going to tell you straight up how my work tried to kill it.
I worked as an editor and we edited science journals. Journals that we, communication majors, would not dare touch with a 20-foot pole. Why I took this job, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe because I needed money, maybe I wanted to one-up my batch mates who were still looking for jobs, I can’t tell you for sure.
Looking at my job from outside, I think one would say that I should have known that it would try to kill my creativity. Creativity does not belong in editing science journals you might say. However, I think this is not the case. The journals may be boring as hell but I felt there was something I could do creatively for these articles about yttrium aluminum garnets and light emitting diodes.
I know the common idea about creativity involves, colors, and luster, and other fun things but I think creativity does not solely rely on these things. I knew I could do something creative to those articles that would help its readers understand it better. May it be deciphering what a Chinese author wants to communicate, but can’t, due to the fact that English isn’t something that is natural to him or it could also be about trying to find a way to alter the author’s table in a way that it could be understood easier by the reader; I thought that there is a chance to do something creative in this line of work.
However, after a couple of years working there, the management decided to employ a quality assurance system for our work. It was a welcome addition as it ensures that we submit high quality work. But the management mishandled the whole thing. They hired some employees that were let go from another project. They didn’t have a solid English background and knew nothing about our workflow.
The QA trained for a couple of months then started their work. The problem arose when the stuff that we normally do with our manuscripts were branded as errors. As a copyeditor, we had some sort of creative leeway. But now it was taken away from us, we were supposed to adhere to whatever they think is right. I slowly lost interest with the job from that point, not because someone was checking my work but because I now have to explain fairly simple grammatical stuff to them so that my work won’t be branded as poor. We’d spend countless e-mails going back and forth about a single sentence and it was time that I could have spent doing something else.
This is where Ken Robinson’s article meshed with my experience. As he explained, the education system that the world has was founded centuries ago and it was primarily to aid the industrial revolution. It teaches us to answer that we want to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a pilot when asked what we want to be in the future. I think the current work environment, in general, suggests that we do everything like how it’s been done before. Sure, companies tell people they want innovators and out-of-the-box thinkers, but after these highly creative people are hired, they end up doing what everyone else does. Their new ideas don’t end up being accommodated due to a multitude of reasons. He can’t be taken seriously because he’s just a new guy, a fresh graduate at that or his idea can’t reach the boss because I, as his superior, will look bad if it does. Our current economic system discourages creativity. Sure, the ad agencies out there are always pushing the envelope and finding new ways to promote whatever it is that they are promoting, but this is only a very small part in the entire economy of the world. The sad part is that even in the business of “art,” creativity is also discouraged. For example, our country’s movie industry: The films that are going out all seem to have a familiar storyline and familiar characters. The loud gay guy, the mean step mom, the supportive best friend, dumb house helper. We’ve all seen it before. What’s worse is that instead of thinking of new and creative titles to the films, they end up using song titles or familiar song lyrics.
Robinson was trying to drive home the fact that due to the lack of attention given to art and creativity in school, the other facets of our world suffer. Our education system does need tweaking or altering, it needs to be transformed and transformed immediately. It seems like an insurmountable task but we should be starting now.
Computers are, day by day, being modified to be closer, in function and ability, to the human brain. Humans on the other hand are being told it is better to have a computer-like efficiency with their work. Isn’t it ironic?
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