True Knowledge by Sean

True Knowledge by Sean - March 2017 Scholarship Essay

The goal of education is not to learn a set of facts, but to learn how to think about facts. In many ways, our educational system has failed us, and many of the political issues our country now faces stem directly from this issue. The problem lies in our cultural inability to assess the facts that are presented to us in our schools, the media, religious institutions, and our homes. If I were to give a speech in front of a school wide audience, its purpose would be to remind my audience the reason they are in school in the first place: to become good citizens of the world of the mind.
What is accepted as fact changes through time, but what remains constant for the academy is the endless fight to clear the path to the truth. This requires, above all, the ability to forget what one thinks one knows, and replace it with the next wave of knowledge. This process of constant destruction and rebuilding of knowledge is particularly important in the sciences, whose theories progress like an endless staircase, each new theory both building on and rejecting the knowledge supported by its predecessors. This process is slow, but we can apply the lessons it provides to our daily lives. To be good citizens of the world of the mind we must not take too much pride in what we know.
Pride in knowledge is also the foundation for all social prejudice and discrimination of all forms. It is the unyielding confidence in what we know about the people around us that allows us to maintain unfounded assumptions about those different from us. Once one abandons this pride, true knowledge can begin to grow in a completely different form than that of objective fact. True knowledge is characterized by constant change and the abandonment of pride.
As students, we are the most fortunate members of society because we live on the front lines of the creation of knowledge. Once we graduate from our various educational institutions, we will never be so free to learn. But we owe it to our society to never abandon the reverence for true knowledge, and to never become too prideful in what we know.