Know a Rose before You Draw One by Mickey

Know a Rose before You Draw One


     How can a student draw a rose when he doesn't know what it is? "The Little Boy" portrays the story of a boy who seemingly lost his passion for creativity after a teacher trains him with the art of obedience and imitation. After simply following the teacher for some time, the boy meets another teacher. When the second teacher tells the boy to make a drawing, the boy draws the same kind of flower his first teacher had taught him: a red rose. But can we really call this a death of creativity? Because in my opinion, not all red roses look alike.
     The teacher had only been trying to "stuff" the boy with the most fundamental and necessary information, along with cooperation. I believe that, in the modern society, creativity only becomes useful when intellectual support is present, and thus I agree with what the first teacher tried to do. 
     Our protagonist lacked two important traits, and one of them was a basic concept of how flowers look in real life. While a flower with yellow leaves and a purple stem is indeed a blooming sense of imagination, his education or social reputation may be put into question if 
he cannot draw other real-world flowers. While the teacher may have discouraged the boy's creativity to some degree, she was also trying to inform the boy of what roses, sunflowers, and other flowers look like. The boy still had room for creativity after learning what a 'typical' rose looks like. Just as no two people, not even twins, are identical in looks, there are just about trillions of different red roses that may stem from the boy's pool of imagination.
     Deference is the one other feature the boy needed developing. Patience may be the other word. The boy will be facing various directions and orders in life, especially if the boy grows up to enter a bureaucracy. If he is not capable of waiting for the teacher to finish such a simple instruction, how will he adapt to all the sophisticated and difficult instructions in life?
     Even the pearl in an oyster cannot exist without the shells, and the first teacher had just been trying to provide the shells to the boy. Facts and deference never serve as hindrance for creativity, but rather serves as basis for an even richer imagination. Order is something we cannot live without, and the first teacher had surely been only trying to teach the boy these core values that need internalization and are crucial as the boy grows up and encounters the world.