Summer vacation really isn’t supposed to be a time for thinking about school, but nonetheless, it’s been on my mind recently. To be entirely exact, the way certain things are taught has been on my mind recently.

But that’s starting at the middle of the story, so let’s go back to the beginning.

Something you might notice, if you pick up a general science book or any collection of biographies, a lot of great scientific discoveries are made by the outsiders, or the oddballs, or those not in the mainstream scientific community.

Albert Einstein failed to achieve the test scores necessary to enter the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich and developed his theory of relativity while working as a patents clerk.

Hedy Lamarr devised a missile guidance system that was the basis of the one still used today.

Vera Rubin, the woman who discovered dark matter and advanced the idea of galaxy clusters two decades before it became widely accepted, was denied the opportunity to study at Princeton’s astronomy department.

When the idea of glaciers as movers and shapers of geography was first brought up to the British scientific community in the 18th century, the majority of them denounced it as ridiculous. Not long after, a traveler to Switzerland inquired of a local guide what had made the distinctive scrapes on a nearby rock and was casually informed that they were caused by, would you have guessed it, glaciers.

A French tax collector was among the first to demonstrate that water was a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Even Charles Darwin received little formal education in “natural philosophy,” instead planning to earn his living as a clergyman.

Believe me, I could go on and on. Similarly, originality is praised in art and writing, and often those creations viewed as the greatest come from people who were not traditionally part of the system and received little to no formal education.

When J.K. Rowling submitted the manuscript for “Harry Potter,” it was something no professional writer of the time would have dared to consider – it was far too long, far too humorous, on topics considered unsellable in a field that was dying out. And now … well.

On the one hand, these sorts of things are inspiring – at any point in one’s life, provided their interest, care, and work ethic is strong enough, they can make new discoveries and break into new fields.

On the other, these are fields that depend and thrive on originality and creative thinking. New perspectives should be necessary for advancement, but if those perspectives only seem to be coming from outside, what does that say about the interior of the field and the kind of thinking required to reach it?

Science is about experimentation and discovery and unexpected outcomes that lead to new pathways, but science labs in school seem to all be about following exact procedure until you reach a single, desired outcome. English classes focus on certain selected classics as the epitome of literature and drum in the rules of writing as gospel, even though any rule of language you can name has been broken in a wildly spectacular and successful fashion.

I don’t mean to discount all of the many thousands of experiments, advancements, and creations made by those who work in mainstream science or the arts. However, when an entire field of study holds up certain things as good and right, and goes on to praise anything similar and condemn anything different within itself, no wonder new ideas have to come from the outside.

And where does that begin, exactly? With academic conferences dismissing the idea of giant glaciers moving? With standardized test scores funneling brilliant minds away from prestigious schools? Or in the classrooms of those schools themselves, where teachers lay down strict rules and definitions of “this is how we know the world works and anything outside it must be wrong?” Like I said, school perhaps isn’t something to be thinking about in summer … but this is weighing on my mind. — Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy.