Education doesn't just mean learning. by Hanna

Education doesn't just mean learning. by Hanna - October 2022 Scholarship Essay

Education to me doesn’t just mean learning. You can “learn” all about a topic on Facebook and still not be educated on that subject. Education means actually being invested in researching all sides of a topic. It means being open to hearing facts or opinions that you may be morally or politically opposed to, and thinking critically about them. Education doesn’t just happen in a classroom, it happens everyday in real world interactions.
Let’s say you’re in math class. It’s the day where they teach long division. You spend hours that night doing long division problems, over and over again until you can do them perfectly. Does this mean you're educated in math? It doesn’t. It means that you’re good at long division. You have to learn multiplication, exponents, fractions, and radicals to even begin to say you’re educated in the subject of math. I’m currently taking AP calculus and I still don’t know if I’m educated in mathematics. This principle can be applied to anything in life. You have to put in work and time to be truly educated in a certain area.
Next period is history class, and you have a current events presentation due. You forgot about it until 11pm last night. You pick a topic and you only look at one article from Fox News. You use this one article to write your entire presentation, and you feel ready. You present and it goes great, but then your teacher starts asking you questions. She asks you how liberals and conservatives differ on this topic, but you cannot give her a confident answer because you did not do enough research. You may have felt educated on your topic, but you did not look at all sides and thoroughly study the topic. To be truly educated, you need to look at all sides of the argument and think of them all objectively.
The final bell rings, and it’s time to go home. You drive home, and as soon as you walk through the door, you hear your parents talking about who they want to vote for in the upcoming election. You decide to play devil's advocate and propose scenarios from the other candidate’s side. Without even listening to an explanation, they shoot down any semblance of facts from the other side. This is not education. By refusing to even listen and think about other viewpoints, they are not considering the facts from all sides equally. In order to be truly educated, you have to be able to at least consider other sides and then choose for yourself what you believe in.
Education is controlled by you. Sitting in a classroom, going to an internship, or training for a job will not give you a complete education. It is a combination of world experiences, research, and investment. If you don’t have all of these things, then you will never be fully educated on a topic. To me, education is personal and unique- you have to be fully committed to thoroughly researching for yourself and making your own decisions on what is right.