Small School, Big World by Selem

Small School, Big World by Selem - November 2015 Scholarship Essay

There are more than seven billion people in the world. And I am just one of them

For a long time, I went to school, and, like so many other American students, felt like my brain was being crammed with all this useless information that was simply testing my ability to memorize.

Every day, my peers and I would shuffle out of the curriculum-required history class thinking, "Who cares? When am I ever going to use this?"

Some days, I would hear my partner chant the answers to the multiple choice government test like it was a song.

One day, it hit me Maybe it was a song. A song of what dictates our way of life in America, and what we should be doing as citizens.

All around me people are finding all these ways to really succeed without ever learning a thing. And this is from one of the top high schools in the region, filled with students that they called ‘the best and the brightest’, and truly some of the most brilliant people I have ever met. Was it just high school immaturity? Or was this what the education system wanted out of us? What took me so long to comprehend was that the learning part comes from understanding. I can’t exactly pinpoint the moment I understood the aspect of education that applied to my world, but I’d like to think it was a combination of some passionate teachers, a diverse community and just a critical ponderation of what I had acquired from school thus far.

The prompt asks, what aspect of school I am most thankful for, and I am still struggling to find a way to word it. It is the way it opened my mind to a world outside of my own. It is the way I began to sympathize with groups of people in the past that I will never meet. It is the way I began to understand the motivations of the immoral historical figures I will never forgive. It is the way that I got to sit between someone who came from Vietnam six years ago, and someone whose family had owned the same land in Elk Grove fro 150 years, and talk about the relationship between logarithms and exponents. It is the way I found myself conceding to something someone so conservative was arguing about. The best thing I have gotten out of education is the ability to relate what I am reading in a textbook and hearing in a lecture, to the larger world outside of a classroom.

As a seventeen year old girl, living my oblivious life in Sacramento, California, it is so easy to disregard the enormity of the world. It is so easy to get caught up in my everyday problems and consider them the center of the universe. It is so easy to forget that normal to me is so relative, and it’s not applicable to everyone else on the planet. The best thing I have been able to get from my education is the ability to answer the question, “Why does it matter to me?” from anything I learn.