What is an essay anyway? rewrite

So as before an essay is a piece of writing that is either personal, or like a research paper and has been forced in to our minds ever since elementary school. The usual format is five paragraphs with an intro and a conclusion.

Its not that I don't find this fact annoying, its just sadly how it is. As a preteen I tried to understand why we had to stick to the format that had been drilled into our minds by our teachers. Once I tried just writing in the way that felt comfortable to me and it felt liberating to just write and not have to worry about format. My teacher had me stay after class one day to discuss my paper and told me that my paper was great but I couldn't turn it in for a grade. I asked why and they told me that it didn't follow the format that we were supposed to be practicing in the essay.

I was mad that I had to redo my paper and didn't understand at first why it was. Maybe the teachers are lazy and don't want to spend hours reading a paper or they are just following orders. It wasn't until I took a writing exam that I understood. Its an easy way for the people grading the paper to make sure you have the right idea of how to write a paper so they can grade all of them quickly.

I don't like that creativity is being held down because its easer on people grading the papers, but what can we do about it really. The system has been around forever. Without learning some kind of format people would never be able to write an essay. So what is there that we can do?