(Dis)Illusionment and Higher Education

Growing up, I always expected college to be fun. I could take the classes I wanted to take. I would be on my own. I would be an adult for all intents and purposes. I did as I was told as best I could throughout my public school education in my youth. It was not until mid-high school that I started to critically examine the school system. In Spellmeyer’s “Inventing the University Student,” he addresses the use of mass education as a system to create the perfect, upstanding citizen. It helps make people nationalistic and proud of their country, which if effective for the continuation of that country. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances and a pitiful attempt of the school system at creating a comforting environment for its students, I began to see the school system as a factory churning out robotic adults that were supposedly ready for higher education.

As a writer, I did not see the potential of a college degree in writing until about halfway through my junior year of high school. Writing was just something I did and loved doing. I thought college was about getting a degree to get a good job. However, my reading material began addressing things that I had never thought of before, and writing slowly began to take over my life. Before I knew it, it was a part of my identity and what I wanted to pursue in college.

Writing in a university and for a university are two different things for me. Writing in a university is equivalent to writing in a point in my life, whereas writing for a university is the assignments that I am graded on. When I first started out in college, I tried to write what the professor was looking for specifically. In some classes even now, I do that. After my first workshop, though, I began to branch out and play with the words that spill out of my head. Writing for class did not necessarily have to be something straightforward and boring. It could and would be just as beautiful and crafted as a novel I hope to publish.

As Spellmeyer points out, “truth, facts, and knowledge are the property of specialists” (42). Facts and figures were things that I was all too comfortable with and yet not comfortable with at all. I could ace a statistics exam without studying or memorize dates for history, but what I loved was to bend the rules. I like to exist in a world that has strict rules but also the feelings, opinions and intuitions that make life interesting. For me, as both a writer and an individual, facts and knowledge make the structure while feelings and opinions color it in. The balance of those two came with my writing, and being in the Creative Writing major helped to identify that. Classes and grades provided the structure I craved while the writing itself was the creative outlet I needed to survive. My best grades are in my creative writing classes and the worst in the classes that I do not have a chance of expressing myself.

In a way, writing became its own beast in college. Instead of an activity or an assignment, writing became like breathing for me. College was chaos. There are so many people that I do not know and so many cultures and backgrounds that I have never been confronted with before that the culture shock was a little rough at first. I found a community of creative people, and being around them both exited and scared me. Besides the people, new scenarios that I had never expected occurred and changed a lot of who I am as a person. The only constant thing about me became my writing. A lot of people write for catharsis, but I began to write for structure. It became a framing device that helped me focus and sort out my mentality about all of the changes that I was going through.

Spellmeyer talks about the mediators of domains in the world. Everything has someone watching over it, critiquing it, making sure that everything plays by their rules. Even writing has that.  Organizations have opinions and goals in mind, and policing writing can be a way for them to do so. They begin to decide what makes a writer “good” and throw away the rest. Colleges are one of many systems to do this. However, writing is not necessarily just a public thing. Writing, at least for me, is the baring of my soul, of who I am, onto paper. The more I write, the more I realize that. It becomes a way for me to understand myself better. Even if someone says that my writing is not “good” writing, it does not change the fact that it is who I am.

College was something different for me. It was a chance to spread my wings and become a better version of myself, and I like to think that I’ve accomplished that. As a writer, I’ve learned so much in college. I have learned to know myself better and to use my writing for my benefit, not for others. Maybe that was not the point of higher education, but it is one of many lessons that I will be taking away from it. Being a writer is synonymous to being Madelyn for me, and it is more important than anything else I think I will ever accomplish.