Importance of Knowledge by Tan

Importance of Knowledge by Tan - March 2018 Scholarship Essay

From the day that one was born, there is a steady stream of knowledge intake even if one is not consciously aware of the process. As a baby learns to walk, a toddler learns how to ride a bicycle, or a teenager learns to drive a car, they consistently are craving to learn. There are, however, discrepancy when it comes to wanting to acquire the knowledge in an academic setting. Most students would always question, “When are we ever going to employ this in our everyday lives?”. Thus, I think that an important but under-discussed topic is the conceptual understanding of the importance of knowledge.

Knowledge is what we know through personal or shared experiences, however, one needs to ask the question: why is knowledge important? Knowledge is a quintessential element necessary for life. Walking everyday requires one to unconsciously rely on the knowledge they know since a being toddler, while writing is a skill that one recognized but are always improving upon. The difference between the intake of knowledge in school verse that of mechanical knowledge, riding a bike, is that the knowledge acquired in school builds on previous concept, helping one to extend the connection between the previous understanding and the new knowledge, while the intake of mechanical knowledge is a onetime process. This ultimately causes the gap between wanting to learn in school verse needing to know in everyday life. The difficulties to establish connections between previous knowledge and new information causes stress and decrease students acquisition of new knowledge in an academic setting.

In order to fix this gap, I believed that it is necessary to introduce and discuss more about the concept that knowledge is the only aspects that is only to last you a life –time or even sustain an eternity. Many philosophers have passed away, however, their philosophies are still prominent today, for example the philosophies on transcendentalism by Thoreau. Another perspective that support this view is from a Vietnamese proverb that my mom would also tell me is that, “money can come and go, while knowledge will last you a lifetime”. I have assimilated this proverb into my everyday life. By discussing about this topic more frequently, I know that it will bring more light to the topic. Ultimately, helping to close the difference between wanting to learn in school and needing to know in every life.

Conclusively, when student question, “why should we learn?”, a simple answer is that we learn in order to build on our knowledge to better ourself because knowledge is the only thing that we have when everything else may disappear.