Educations Role in Killing Dreams by Ainslee

Educations Role in Killing Dreams by Ainslee - June 2024 Scholarship Essay

I am a killer. I always have been and so has society.

We constantly murder the dreams of individuals who seek to find information outside the normality of education. But as an adolescent I sat under Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, watching as “I saw my life branching out before me,” branch after branch I watched as my dreams unfolded. I have spent my lifetime seated beneath the fig tree looking up with wonder. I tasted the sweetness of possibilities on my lips as I saw my life with many careers through my imagination: a dentist, a veterinarian, a librarian, a lawyer, a mother, and an author. But my eyes always seemed to wander to the highest branch.

As I attempted to climb from the roots in the soil up the trunk of the tree, I visualized administrators and teachers holding saws to my branch. I watched as the figs went sour and fell to the ground, containing my dreams and imagination. They festered in the sun as I bathed in reality.

I have learned more living through the pages of fictional characters than I have inside the lines of textbooks. I became the characters I admired. A knight with the bravery to protect and serve a kingdom, a mermaid with the curiosity to venture to unknown lands, an ordinary girl who possessed a gift that could save her world.

Those traits were transferred from my fingerprints left on the pages, to the mark I left on my academics.

I possessed the bravery to give speeches in front of the student body, I had the curiosity to find my passion and future career, and I was an ordinary girl who became extraordinary at being a leader within her school.

Society has tried to diminish the flame that burns brightly through a child's imagination, but fire is catching within the pages of storybooks and old retellings of tales. Without the fictional characters and informal information, my story would have been shaped differently and I wouldn’t be an adult still looking to the highest branch of the fig tree.

I knew I could picture a comfortable life with any of those careers on the other branches, but nothing seems to be as impactful as imagining myself as a marine biologist.

Thanks to the mermaid in the story who was curious enough to venture to land, I gained the curiosity to look to the sea with wonder.

Thank you for the opportunity to apply for this scholarship and for considering my application.