By Anonymous
Have you ever had an assignment where you had to be creative about something? You had to produce an amazingly original piece of art to get the 7 you desperately needed in your report; or you had to write a creative piece of writing for English that had to be original enough to get your parents off your back? Did you realize, very quickly, that you couldn’t think up anything original? The truth is, the originality problem is a lot more widespread than your art and English homework.
Every day in the media, we see more of the same thing: another pop song just like the one before; another TV police series just like the one before; another comic book superhero plot just like the one before, another teenage dystopian fiction novel just like the Hunger Games etc. In nearly all forms of media today, there is a lack of originality. When you watch a new film with this amazing new ‘original’ plot twist, you’ll realize that that a Disney film did it 20 years ago.
Everyone appears to lacking originality. Everything that you think up appears to already have been thought up by someone else a century before. Not only is this very annoying for homework assignments where you are supposed to be thinking up something amazing and original; but it can be very damaging for you psychologically. If you start thinking bad about yourself because you can’t think up anything original, it will have detrimental effects for your self-esteem, and consequently; your future. Not everyone can be a Steve Jobs, but not everyone has to be a garbage truck driver.
When a teacher was asked whether he thought that there was such a thing as a limit to originality, and whether we had reached that limit; he replied “I think that originality has to be defined before we can start debating it. It is a word that is described for something new and inventive. Now, there are always new things: cars, smartphones etc. These new things are generally very inventive in their manufacturing and product design. The trouble is that we’ve stopped inventing alternatives to the car itself, and we’re just continuing to update the same versions of the same car. There is no limit to originality, but the pace of originality has started to slow significantly in recent years”.
So, how does this apply to us, at school? Don’t think of how you’ve got to write another piece of creative writing or how you’ve got to create another piece of art: think about how you can turn the assignment on its head. I promise you it will get a reaction, if nothing else.
