Public Education Is Way More Important Than You Think
Former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela once said, "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
Though many people today feel that public education in America is broken and diverges from the root of school, which is learning, public school is still a free education system that all students should take full advantage of and teaches students many lessons that they can apply to their lives.
I have attended school for over a decade now, the majority of my life. Many argue that the modern school system is broken and that it teaches students nothing. I mean, if I spend so much time in the confined walls of school, it must have some use, right? Yes, because any education is ammunition we can use to change this world for better or for worse. Think about this. If you went to your favorite store and saw one of the items in the store for free, you probably would not even think twice about taking the item.
I feel that we should have this mindset when we go to school because, at the end of the day, we receive education for free. We have been given a free gift of education, something many children around the world don't have access to. We need to respect the opportunity given to us and utilize it to help others.
Since us students have spent most of our lives at school, it has shaped us into the people we are today. Education at school allows us to have experiences we never would have encountered without it. Many feel that school teaches us no real-life skills, but that simply isn't true. Even something like pop quizzes can teach us that not only life is not fair, but we will not always know the answer to all the questions.
School teaches us to think critically, to persevere, and to problem solve. School is often seen as a place for regurgitation, and in a way, it is. But memorization is a necessary skill in every field. Many jobs require extensive memorization including doctors, engineers, and lawyers. Knowledge is power, and memorizing information is empowerment in the purest form. Group projects are essential for learning collaboration and leadership skills. It's unlikely that just one person can make a whole product themselves, but utilizing the strengths and overcoming the weaknesses of a team together will produce a successful product.
Studying and reading textbooks and books shows us that not everything in life will not be fun and easy, but tenacity and grit are necessary for results. Grades and GPA have taught us that life has competition, whether we like it or not, we will have to go against friends and enemies to be more successful, earn more money, and be more intelligent.
Teachers have taught us that we can have a good mentor that will be by our side helping and guiding us on our way, a strict boss that will be strict with deadlines, allows no room for errors, and expects the best from you all the time, or a clueless mentor that will not know anything, so we have to critically think for ourselves and figure things out on our own. Science experiments and labs have allowed us to see that there is more to the world than the answers found in a textbook. So why do people say that at school we learn nothing that could help us in the future when there is so much more to education?
The answer is they do not put in the time and the effort into education to realize its importance. If only people would take advantage of this free education that America offers and use it to its full power, then and only then we will be able to see the impact of education in our lives.
I, myself, truly discovered the power of education in the school library, not from a book or a computer, but from a table. At this table sat a ninth grader struggling in Math, and my teacher asked me to go and tutor him for 30 minutes during my lunch period. I wanted to take the opportunity to teach because I love to meet new people and help out whenever I can. During lunch, I went to the library to help him out because he had a test the next day. I had never met this boy, but when I explained to him how to factor trinomials, his eyes opened in astonishment as he says, "I understand!" It made me so happy just to see him figure it out. That day I taught my first student and helped him get an A on his test.
I realized the way teachers feel after they teach the class something new every day, and I wanted to continue to help others. I offered to help tutor others, and I continued to feel the joy of teaching. I realized that education is truly a weapon that can spread like a disease. I can teach one person, they can teach someone else, and that someone can teach another person. It is like a chain reaction, with each student empowering the next.
As Nelson Mandela once said, "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Education is about experiencing new things and gaining new insight, and it is important to our success on this planet. School is usually where we gain an education, and we need to realize its importance of it because it can teach us so much about life that we can apply in the future. With education, we can identify big problems that the world faces, like poverty, or small problems, like a student not knowing how to use the Quadratic Formula, and we can find educated solutions to fix them and change the world.
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