Education Provides Knowledge, Knowledge Provides Awareness by Emily

Education Provides Knowledge, Knowledge Provides Awareness by Emily - April 2015 Scholarship Essay

The world is a compilation of people with several different stories, backgrounds, and values. In this way, education carries a different meaning to people all over the world. To some, it may mean a chance for survival. To others, it may mean a pathway to their dream career. However, with education and its ambiguous meaning, it still carries a constant purpose: awareness. To understand the world to our best extent is one of the most difficult goals to accomplish in life. There may not be one single person who understand the world with a 360° perspective. The constant seeking of new perspectives through math, history, science, humanities, and current events, is essentially what education is. This will inevitably be the key to someone’s success in today’s world because regardless of the reason people choose to educate themselves, the search for new perspectives will widen their lens in which they see the world through.

Our brain makes several connections a day, but the connections we make are similar to the ones we have previously made, similar to a learned association. For example, if I have learned that McDonald’s is unhealthy, I might look at someone’s lunch from McDonald’s and think, “Wow, they have no problem eating unhealthy food”. Without learning any other perspective or hearing other opinions about McDonald’s, I might consistently associate the food with people who are unhealthy. If we get stuck in this mindset, we can easily live our lives with a limited perspective, also influencing others around us to think in a restricted way. Education opens our minds to new perspectives that will make us question all that we have known, giving us the tools to learn how to understand the world in a more multifaceted way.

Even if some do not have access to public education, they can still seek education in different ways. For example, although African-American slaves in the 1800's were illiterate and considered uneducated, they were wise and creative in terms of problem solving and strategizing. There was a famous story of how Harriet Tubman was helping fugitive slaves escape when white men ran by searching for her. She took a book and covered her face like she was reading, even though she didn't know how to read and even held the book upside down. She was able to save her own life using her own problem solving strategies and creativity. Since she was searching for successful ways she could save her life, she has essentially educated herself in survival strategies and has learned something useful that she could use again. In any field of work, these abstract educational skills are certainly valued, and they don’t necessarily come with a public or private education at school.

If the world is an educated society that continued to seek contrary opinions and thoughts, people would be more considerate and wise. In powerful corporations, those with open mindsets will succeed by considering the diversity of their consumers and work to be less biased or unjust. Our society will also become more educated in abstract ways like problem solving, flexibility, leadership. These are concepts that would be useful in every field of study and would prepare all students and future leaders to be successful in positively influential ways.