History for the Future by Emilee

History for the Future by Emilee - December 2018 Scholarship Essay

It goes without saying that a Nobel Prize recipient needs to deserve such a prestigious award, but the most deserving are those whose resumés include the most outstanding achievements of the year, the types of achievements that prepare us for the future and, when that future arrives, we will look through the history books and see that this person all those years ago was responsible for such excellency. The recipients must have created or begun something that would educate, enlighten - something that would bring hope to the present and gracious relief to generations to come, since their times would not have been nearly as pleasant if that person and their doings had never existed. This applies to every Prize category, since they all contribute their parts to history and the shaping of the years to come.

Past Nobel Prize winners are clear examples that this is an unspoken requirement; where would the world today be without the International Red Cross movement, founded by Jean Henri Dunant of Switzerland (source: nobelprize.org)? without U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and his treaty for peace in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War? or Jane Addams’s legendary Hull House or her presidency of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom? Indeed, the world would look far more different, but it also would have become a far less hopeful future for the populations at the time.

But what about the winners whose achievements aren’t nearly as specific? What about those who didn’t found an organization or serve terms in office? Of course they’re just as deserving of the Prize, since their accomplishments have and have had the same potential to shape the good of the future; Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Prize winner ever at 17 years, is a prime example of this. By the time she received the award, she had no foundations or organizations or inventions to her name; she was just a regular Pakistani teenager until a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in October, 2012 (source: The New York Times). But, just like Roosevelt or Dunant, she is still wholly deserving of her Nobel Prize, all because of what she did before and did after the attack. She is an extremely vocal activist for women and children’s rights, specifically education rights, and despite the ongoing threats to her life for this, she holds her ground and refuses to be silenced. Both she and Kailash Satyarthi from India were awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize not for any specific creations but for their "struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education” (nobelprize), an achievement that will surely pave the way for organizations and rights and laws and general hope for the future - just as, as stated before, a Nobel Prize-worthy achievement should.

In this regard, Nobel Prize recipients are the people whose names history will never forget, those who have done something great, regardless if that something is physical or a value or even a simple action, something that will help guide the to-be generations to happier, better educated times.