Unlearning What School Taught Us

Lines.

That’s what we did in our first class of our first day in college. Just straight lines across a piece of paper.

I remember how disappointing it was when the teacher announced the task. We all just stared at each other, not really willing to start such boring class work, because, after all, how hard can it be to draw lines?
After a few seconds we all noisily opened our bags and took the utensils necessary for the lines. Papers, rulers, pencils and erasers were all displayed in front of us. When some had already started the lines, working with meticulous precision, the teacher announced that the assignment was to be done without rulers, pencils or erasers. It was to be done directly with pen and had to be real straight lines. Again, easy task, right?

We spent the next hour and a half struggling to do so. To actually achieve the perfection we assumed the teacher had asked for without trying to erase anything at all. By the end of the class we just gave up and took the class work as homework. And the same scene repeated itself for the next few days, not only with lines, but with circles, ellipses and perspective drawing. No pencil, no ruler, no eraser. That was the formula to be followed.
We all hated the class, and some people even started searching for creative ways to cheat. Coins for the circles, a pen used as a ruler, really thin guidelines done with rulers and so on. The teacher spotted it every one of the cheating methods, and, of course, made us repeat all the work.

It took us three weeks to actually understand the basis for the exercises that made us go crazy for days. It was the start of our new training (or un-training if you wish) as design students. We learned that basically all our school years consisted on squatting our creative thinking into nothing. The use of an eraser and a ruler made us become insecure. We feared to be imperfect so much that we didn’t even tried to work without our security nets, after all, in school, if it wasn’t straight or clean enough you’d get a bad grade.

As kids we were all brainwashed. Our drawings that consisted of trees being blue and the sky cotton candy pink were all frowned upon. And so, we were all turned into machines carefully following the guidelines that society had established for us.

The point of this class was not for us to learn how to draw, but to learn to be secure of the things we draw. It’s a hard lesson that even now we’re struggling with. We’re just starting to view the world from a different perspective; even colors changed around us. The whole idea of deeming school teachings to be almost useless in college is still unnerving, and we’ll never be completely free, nor will we regain our naïve childish creativity, but we’ll still be trying.

Granted, not all what school taught us is to be forgotten but it still is quite bothersome to actually analyze how much it has affected us all and how it taught us to rely on things that help us being insecure even though we don’t even notice.

Amazing what drawing lines can do, right?