The Purpose of Education by Danielle

The Purpose of Education by Danielle - April 2015 Scholarship Essay

When most people think of education, they think of getting a college degree. While getting a college degree can be the purpose of education for some people, I do not believe that is the purpose of education as a whole. Albert Einstein once said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” To me, an education is about more than just getting a fancy piece of paper with your name on it. I believe that the purpose of education is to be able to succeed in whatever it is you want to do in life.

Every person is unique. Even the best of friends can have very different ideas of what will make them happy in life. I love math and science, and am going to school to become a pharmacist. My brother, on the other hand, loves working with his hands and building things, so he is going to school for construction management. Obviously, the curricula involved in getting these two degrees are vastly different from each other, but the education is the same. An education is not about learning facts. An education is about understanding, and learning how to learn in everyday situations.

Learning how to understand the world and think about things in new ways can be a challenge for some people, though. For example, I have always been fascinated by the world around me, and love learning about how the body works; however, I struggle in my economics class because I am very scientifically-minded, and would much rather be learning about the steps of glycolysis than fiscal policy. So, when it came time for me to start applying for an on-campus job earlier this year, I decided to apply at Ferris’s tutoring center. I currently tutor students in chemistry and biology. Many of the students I tutor come in and tell me that they are having a hard time because they are not science majors, and are not used to having to think about things scientifically. For these students, science classes (or classes like economics, for me) are not required because they will need to know how evolution works in their day-to-day lives after college, but because it is important for them to learn how to think about things differently. Then, when faced with a problem in their future career, they will be able to think through it in multiple ways.

I believe that the purpose of education is not only to learn facts for whatever job you will have in the future, but also to open your mind to some of the other ways of thinking that are in the world. Education is not about how many facts you can learn, but how you use your knowledge to solve real world problems. I think education reformer John Dewey summed up education rather nicely, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” The purpose of education is not to memorize facts and theories, but to open your mind to new ways of solving problems and learning to continue expanding on your knowledge every day.