The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
That's no longer true at the university level. In fact, writing has been systematically dissociated from literary studies for a host of reasons, some political, some practical, as composition has established itself as a separate discipline. Only a minority of schools still link the two. (This isn't to say that writing courses aren't still grouped under the auspices of the English Department, only that literature, if it appears at all in a writing classroom, is used for reasons other than its literariness -- i.e. to introduce social issues, etc.)
It has never been the case that serious university-level courses in, say, history or political theory or linguistics didn’t require serious paper writing.
High school is mentioned explicitly, but we aren't talking about it exclusively. "High schools imitate universities," in pg's words, and he spends rather a lot of time historicizing the issue in those terms.
(The account he offers is, well, not so much flat-out wrong as woefully incomplete. See A.J. Minnis' Medieval Theory of Authorship for a definitive scholarly account of the genesis of professional literary studies.)
I had to write essays for subjects other than English from middle school onwards. IIRC mostly for history, with some geography as well. Key point being from my education, essays have always been about making a structured argument, and not exclusively about literature.
Same for me. When I was in the equivalent of high school, I had to write essays in Art, English, History, Geography, Latin, Biology, and Physics.
History, in particular, explicitly emphasised structured arguments and critical analysis of sources. I think we wrote short essays, in class, at least 3 times a week. We had a fantastic teacher and I remember it being good fun...felt like decoding puzzles.
Another example I can remember was in English. We spent several weeks reading, discussing, and writing about Brighton Rock in a very structured way. We were then given a creative assignment with 3 options; one was to write a screenplay, which I did. So at 14/15 I absolutely loved writing my first (and only) screenplay.
Maybe I was lucky, but I enjoyed writing essays at school.
The problem with the idea being ascribed to Paul Graham (writing about whatever you are passionate about rather than English literature) is that it's a strategy for teaching smart, passionate kids — and they're not the kids the education system is most egregiously failing.
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
That's no longer true at the university level. In fact, writing has been systematically dissociated from literary studies for a host of reasons, some political, some practical, as composition has established itself as a separate discipline. Only a minority of schools still link the two. (This isn't to say that writing courses aren't still grouped under the auspices of the English Department, only that literature, if it appears at all in a writing classroom, is used for reasons other than its literariness -- i.e. to introduce social issues, etc.)