The applause was a physical thing, a wall of sound that pressed against my chest. From the seventh row, I watched the valedictorian, a student with a staggering 4.7 GPA, deliver a speech of breathtaking eloquence and absolute emptiness. He quoted Mandela and Frost. He spoke of journeys and futures, of doors opening and paths forged. It was flawless. Every cadence was perfect, every pause timed for dramatic effect. And in its 7 minutes of rhetorical perfection, it contained not a single idea that could make a single person in that auditorium uncomfortable. It was the academic equivalent of a beige wall. The crowd, a sea of proud parents and restless siblings, gave a standing ovation.

We love this. We reward it. We have built an entire educational apparatus designed to produce this exact outcome: the articulate, compliant, high-achieving student who has mastered the art of telling us exactly what we expect to hear. They are excellent sheep.

They follow the path, check every box, and collect the blue ribbons. They ace the tests because the tests measure their ability to recall and apply known formulas to predictable problems. They write beautiful, five-paragraph essays on themes that have been dissected for 77 years. They lead the clubs and play the sports and log the community service hours. And we, the parents and educators, nod in approval, convinced we are raising the next generation of leaders.

But are we? We lionize the innovators-the disruptors who see the world not as a set of instructions to be followed, but as a pile of parts to be reassembled in a new way. Yet the skills required for innovation are precisely the ones our system punishes. True innovation requires a high tolerance for ambiguity, a comfort with failure, and a willingness to ask questions that don’t have answers at the back of the book. It demands intellectual risk-taking. And risk, in our system of standardized metrics, is a liability. A failed experiment doesn’t look good on a transcript. A truly original thesis that a teacher doesn’t quite understand might earn a B, not an A. And a B is a catastrophe.

I confess, I am part of the problem. Years ago, my own son, then 7, had a science fair project. I steered him toward the safest, most reliable option: the baking soda and vinegar volcano. I helped him build the perfect papier-mâché cone. We practiced the presentation. He got an A. He perfectly executed a known procedure. He demonstrated nothing more than an ability to follow my directions. I praised him for the grade, for the ribbon, for his ‘excellent work.’ What I failed to do was ask him what he was curious about. What weird, unanswerable question was bouncing around in his head? Maybe he wanted to know if you could make a square bubble. Maybe he wanted to know why cats purr. The volcano wasn’t his project; it was my fear of him failing, disguised as parental guidance.

Max’s mind works differently. He sees a head of lettuce and wonders if it could sound like a head being crushed. He looks at a rusty gate hinge and hears a monster’s scream. This is innovative thinking. It is associative, playful, and relentlessly curious. It is the polar opposite of the thinking we cultivate in our honor-roll students. A student trained to find the ‘one right answer’ would look at a stalk of celery and see only a vegetable, a source of 7 calories. They would never think to snap it next to a microphone to simulate a compound fracture.

We have created a pipeline that filters out the Maxes of the world.

Or, worse, it forces the potential Maxes to suppress their strange, brilliant instincts in favor of scoring in the 97th percentile. We tell them to be creative, but only within the confines of the rubric. We encourage them to be unique, but not so unique that it makes the admissions committee nervous. A recent survey of 237 top-tier college admissions officers revealed a preference for students with a ‘focused narrative,’ which is often code for a predictable and well-manicured application. The kid who spent high school building a working trebuchet in his backyard might be more interesting, but the kid with a 4.7 GPA and presidency of 47 different clubs is a safer bet.

The goal isn’t to turn every child into a foley artist. It’s about preserving the instinct to look at a stalk of celery and see more than just a stalk of celery. It’s about creating spaces where failure isn’t a grade, but data. Where the ‘wrong’ answer to a question is more interesting than the right one. This isn’t an indictment of the students themselves; they are masters of the game we have forced them to play. They are brilliant. But their brilliance is channeled into a narrow, deep reservoir of conformity. We are so focused on making sure they don’t get anything wrong that we’ve forgotten to teach them how to create something new.

We need to stop applauding for the eloquent emptiness and start making room for the awkward, passionate, and sometimes-failed attempts at originality. We need fewer perfect volcanoes and more square bubbles. We need to stop asking our kids, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and start asking, ‘What problem do you want to solve?’ The first question has a right answer. The second one has a thousand, and none of them are in the back of the book.