The Future will Die Without Us by Emily

The Future will Die Without Us by Emily - April 2015 Scholarship Essay

There are many ways to live life to the fullest. Obtaining a college education does not mean that a person is superior to someone who chose a different path. As long as someone on their deathbed can look back at a life with no regrets, a college education becomes nothing more than a lifestyle choice. Does it open up new, more successful career paths? Certainly. But is it necessary to live a successful life? That simply depends on the person. Many people never get the opportunity to go to college and still manage to live fulfilling lives.

When looked at from that perspective, college seems like one of many possible options, none of which are better than the others. However, I believe a higher education is critical for one particular reason: If no one chooses to go to college and obtain as much knowledge as they can, then who will pass it on to the next generation? The wealth of collected knowledge throughout human history has only survived because it has been constantly passed down through the years. It pains me to imagine how much knowledge was lost as each ancient culture died out without leaving records. If none of my high school teachers had chosen to go to college and pass on their knowledge, how would my classmates and I have learned anything? I only know about computers and math because my dad got a college degree and then taught me what he knew. If we are not constantly enriching our own intelligence and passing it on to others, it will die.
In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, an empire that spans a galaxy is on the verge of collapse. The protagonist of the story claims that the only way to save the Empire is to compile a vast collection of the galaxy's knowledge and pass it on to the next generations. However, he knows that such a project will inevitably fail because knowledge, placed into a book and never enriched, is as useless as writing a masterpiece only to put it on the shelf and never look at it again.

Knowledge in and of itself is worthless unless it is put to use. Even a physicist who spends his entire career developing a particle accelerator is of no value unless he passes on his findings to others. At the end of a person's life, they are still just as dead as someone without a college education. The only thing that matters is if they passed on what they knew to the next generation. The amazing technology and ideas in our society today could only be made possible by the combined knowledge of every generation before us. So, in the end, the only purpose of an education is to selflessly use it to enrich the knowledge of everyone who comes after us.