Keep Learning by Alice

Keep Learning by Alice - April 2014 Scholarship Essay

As a child I was often told that I was talented. Because adults told me so, I accepted it and never felt the need to work hard. I understood the need to practice and study only after I read “Flowers for Algernon” in 6th grade. I began learning for the sake of discovering new things and with the notion that someday, I could use my knowledge to help people and make the world a better place. I also realized that by not learning, I was being selfish. The main character in “Flowers for Algernon”, Charlie, had a learning disability and wanted to learn to read and write, more than anything else in the world. It took him a year to learn the same thing an “average person” could learn in a month, but he never gave up.

Because of Charlie’s strive to learn, he was chosen for an experiment. Doctors performed a surgery on Charlie’s brain that made him apt at learning. His acquired aptitude, in combination with his will to learn, made him a genius. Toward the end of the book the positive effects of the surgery wore off and Charlie regressed to the mental state in which he was before the surgery. However, even though his mental aptitude deteriorated, I realized that he stayed the same person throughout the whole book; his thirst for knowledge remained a permanent part of him and his kind nature never faltered. Even when Charlie became a famous genius, he did not become pompous, boastful, or condescending; qualities that people a lot less worthy of respect had. Also, after he returned to his initial mental state and forgot all the knowledge he gained, he still remembered about a laboratory mouse that died. The last words that Charlie wrote were to ask someone to put flowers on the mouse’s grave. This memory of the mouse stayed with him, purely because of Charlie’s heart.

Charlie has had a lasting influence on me and is my inspiration to keep learning. He has taught me that learning is crucial for you as a human because it is through learning that you come to be and understand yourself, yet it is not your talents, intelligence, nor knowledge, that define you. It is how you apply what you are given, and what you do with the knowledge you gain, that defines you. This is why I learn not only out of curiosity, but to create something bigger than myself that will help the world and future generations flourish.