A couple days ago, I watched a TED talk from 2006 by one Sir Ken Robinson. It was titled “Do schools kill creativity?” It was a simple talk – there were no slides, no displays, no music – indeed, the only real action I observed during the talk occurred when Robinson buttoned and then unbuttoned his suit. So yes, it wasn’t the most dynamic speech I had ever seen. But it was, without doubt, one of the best presentations I had ever attended (albeit dressed in pajamas, in my bed and on my laptop).

The problem I keep running into after I see a good TED talk is that I immediately feel like writing a column about the exact same subject. I think of it as inspiration. Everyone else seems to consider it plagiarism. So I have to be really careful with how I funnel the intense emotional and often physical excitement that follow good talks, since for the most part, these presentations are a mere snapshot into the work and research that today’s great minds have completed. For example, after watching Bryan Stevenson’s talk on incarceration and injustice, I got to work right away, writing a passionate piece about justice in the legal system. A couple of paragraphs in, I realized I had no idea what I was talking about, save for a short personal anecdote about a seventh-grade field trip to the local penitentiary and my love for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

But I must say, Robinson’s talk most touched on a subject that until recently, I didn’t quite know how to address. It eloquently described what I’ve noticed to be a slow leakage of creativity that seems to accompany kids in every additional year of schooling since their elementary days.

Now, I know it’s a dangerous, presumptuous thing to generalize a personal experience to an entire phenomenon. But on the off chance that someone else has experienced the same, niggling little concern that they are slowly losing their edge to some unseen force, I’ll offer some personal insight into the matter.

A few minutes into the talk, Robinson told the story of a little girl who was drawing a picture in class. Her teacher asked her, “What are you drawing?” to which the girl answered, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” The teacher responded, “But nobody knows what God looks like!” And the girl said, “Well, they will in a minute.”

As a kid, I would often say and do these kind of off-colored, unintentionally funny things in front of my teachers and parents, who in turn would refer me to school counselors and suggest moving me to more specialized schools. In fact, after I got into some serious trouble twice (once for releasing my secret bug collection in class and again for chucking a girl’s backpack, clothes, and shoes on the roof during P.E.), I was actually moved to another school.

“We stigmatize mistakes,” Robinson declared, in his quiet, yet ringing British accent. “We are educating people out of their creative capacities.” Now, I don’t know if Robinson was quite talking about my particular brand of creativity (which was temporarily labeled, in turn, as variants of ADHD, neuroticism, introversion, mild autism and severe idiocy until the seventh grade). But if I could add one positive trait to the list above, it would be “fearlessness.” I was utterly unafraid of making mistakes, both socially and academically.

I grew out of my more rebellious phase roughly around the age of 13. This is when I began to write – short stories, long stories, news stories, non-fiction accounts, science journals, etc. I don’t think they were necessarily any good, but I wrote them anyway, since there isn’t much to do in middle school other than sticking gum to the underside of desks and avoiding P.E. I was still very different and still academically ambiguous. But I was the kid who believed she would be famous someday and teach the kids who had once locked her in stairwells that she actually was a genius, not just a weirdo.

Robinson quoted Picasso as saying, “All children are born artists. The problem is remaining an artist as we grow up.” Unfortunately, after two years here at Stanford, I don’t think I’m quite a match for this problem. I am a psychology major with an economics minor. I’ve learned about risk aversion and game theory from so many different angles that it’s impossible not to think about each decision in terms of my next decision, and the one after that, and the 10 after that. And I can’t afford not to. I can’t remember the last time I took a bigger risk than choosing a different route to get to my 1:15pm lecture in the quad (and even that made my heart beat a little quicker).

I have the next and last two years at Stanford on an Excel spreadsheet. It’s actually open right now in another window, but I don’t think I have the guts to make any major revisions at this point. So I’ll graduate soon with an impressive Bachelor’s and a ring, if I can afford it – a disappointment to Picasso and a disappointment to my 7th-grade self, a girl who truly, earnestly believed in the importance of her own creativity.

It’s a sad note to end on. And like most of my other columns, I don’t know if I have a real resolution, or any kind of satisfying denouement. Perhaps this is because I’m not sure which episode, during my educational series, triggered the decline in my willingness to take risks. It might have been when all my friends made a fad out of taking AP chemistry, or when I realized that writing short stories (and columns) is so pitifully unprofitable. But I do know that as I’ve grown up, become more socially acceptable, and gotten smarter, I’ve grown out of myself and more into the institutions I am surrounded by. Like everything else in life, it’s give-and-take. But I’m afraid I’ve given up far more than what I’ve taken.

In conclusion, I’ll offer one of those grand, sweeping, presidential recommendations, which serves nothing more than to annoy the heck out of everyone. Our education system ought to stop prioritizing order over individuality. Indeed, today’s schools have quite efficiently hierarchized classes and subjects, such that the routes students take through getting an education have become increasingly less diverse. Don’t get me wrong; maintaining structure in the education system is essential for learning – building upon students’ knowledge requires a firm teaching infrastructure. But it must also allow for a certain degree of flexibility for the vast array of teaching styles, learning capabilities, personalities and talents.

Many students are doing some fantastic things here. Some really are artists, and not just juvenile delinquents. But I’d like to emphasize to those who don’t yet have their four-year Excel spreadsheet locked into place that this is a time, more than any other, to reclaim whatever creativity was lost thus far. And I’m not just talking about taking that strange Chinese acupuncture class for three units. I’m talking about taking risks that might change your life, for better or for worse.

Because, and I hope Robinson would agree, I think that is what being an artist really means.

Take a risk, and let Uttara know what you thought of this column at [email protected].