Humans, being social animals encoded in DNA, have a desire to share thoughts.
Speaking and writing are the main media for sharing. Speaking works the best for bidirectional exchange with the benefit of face-to-face resonance, while writing works best for unidirectional broadcasting with the benefit of conciseness, speed, and the unique ability for a thought to transcend time and space. Furthermore, writing requires the underlying thought to be more organized, and more organized thought leads to higher quality thinking.
Good writing must have merit in:
- Content. It should be something the reader should care, which means it should offer some novel perspectives on a subject of somewhat importance
- Presentation. Clear, concise, and elegant
I strive to accomplish such merits in my writing; nowhere is my writing close to the quality of professional writers and veteran bloggers, but at least I strive to put genuine thought and effort into it.
In high school or even college, much of the subject we as students were forced to write was analysis on various English literature. Paul Graham pointed out that this tradition originated from university English professors, who, as professors, must conduct research of some sorts to justify their tenure, and as English professors, analyzing old texts seemed to be the only path to English research; high school curriculum simply copied such tradition and forced high school students to write about English literature too.
School writing was thus boring precisely because it lacked merit in:
- Content. Teenagers couldn't care less about the symbolism of a random junk in a book that they would never otherwise have touched except for that English class
- Presentation. Careless content naturally leads to poor presentation, which was worsened by the strict format of "intro-thesis-topic-sentence-citation-analysis-conclusion" imposed on school writing
In my proposal, modern English curriculum must invite thoughts on content that people would care, and give more flexibility on the presentation structure of the essay produced. Don't continue the outdated literary analysis. Literature was the Netflix of the 1800s. So, as an example, why not let people write about current-day Netflix shows or events?
The problem with my proposal is that, allowing such high flexibility require extensive effort and merit on the teaching quality, and, as an education system aimed to be mass-produced than personalized, besides a handful of genuinely passionate teachers, the current education system simply couldn't execute my proposal, even if they would accept my proposal in the first place.
I hated every English class I was forced to sit in, but now, after picking up blogging on iamjiamingliu.com, I have begun to see what writing actually is: sharing genuine thoughts. Sharing thoughts that matter to me. Sharing thoughts that also might matter to the reader. Sharing is fun, thus, by transitivity, writing is fun.