The Seeds of Wisdom Grows Stronger in Darkness by Sean

The Seeds of Wisdom Grows Stronger in Darkness by Sean - November 2013 Scholarship Essay

Having attended high school while incarcerated at Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility, my experiences are quite different from those of an average high school student. I often joked, and still do, by claiming that if we colored inside the lines, spelled our names correctly, and didn't hit anybody with a chair, we were given high school credit; to some extent that was true. So when I realized that I was one day to be paroled and sent out into a real school, I would actually be well behind my potential classmates. I would actually be put into a worse position academically, having attended school while locked up. So I started reading what I thought high school kids my age would be reading. I started reading Plato and Shakespeare, Darwin and Nietzsche. I took an invested interest in my own education and made a concerted effort to rise to challenge of becoming up-to-par with my peers beyond the walls I inhabited. I never made it to a regular public high school, but I soon learned upon parole that due to my self-directed education, that I was well beyond the common intellect of my age group.

Granted it took me years after parole to be able to rise above my upbringing. I hoped that getting a good blue collar job was going to fix me. However, due to a childhood spent behind bars, I still had a lot of living I had yet to do first. If only the life I had led, prior to me needing to get sober, could be called a life at all, I would be wise man today. But humbly at the age of 33, and five years sober, I am finally getting ready to transfer to a four year university, in hopes of an English degree. I now want to teach at-risk and incarcerated youth. Ironically enough, the boy who was self-educated is now hoping to educate others.

Education is not about jumping through hoops. It is about challenging the current paradigm and trying to rise above it. Education is the dedicated pursuit of wisdom, not facts. In my collective four years behind bars, I found that I could not rely on the system to work for me; I would only ever excel as long as I took nothing at face value, but looked at everything through the lens of critical analysis. Only then could I ever succeed at life, and only then. No matter where I was, what position I was placed in, if dissected every moment for everything it was worth, I came away with the seeds of true wisdom.