Education and schooling have and continue to serve as an integral part of my life (going on 13 years now with, I hope, many more). Every day since I turned 3-years-old, I’ve spent some 6 hours a day, 5 days a week in school. That adds up to a lot of time in school. And I often, lately, ask myself: what has all this time consumed in schooling done for me? And I always, even lately, answer my question thus: education affords me the reliance to think for myself as an individual. Education allows me to use the knowledge I learn in school to help me unravel the unanswered questions of my world—to discover and explore it. Schooling pushes me to engage, question, answer and argue things logically and rationally; sometimes I’m pushed far enough to engage, question, argue and think outside of the box (and when I nudge beyond the cliché, I think outside of the circle). Education and schooling provides an experience for me that allows me to sift through many different subjects and topics, helping to form and determine my many likes and dislikes. But clearly, education and schooling helps me in a very real and practical way: to set goals for myself. Without goals, I’ve found, I can get easily lost, distracted, off-track, less motivated and generally directionless. Education and schooling shows me why a boat needs a rudder.
Defining education as “the gradual process of acquiring knowledge,” I know and understand that my education and schooling won’t end when I graduate high school and college (not to mention post-doctoral and the fellowships—did I mention goals?) Education is not a thing to be terminated like a contract or even a relationship. We must grow and learn (and re-align our goals as we do) everyday of our lives. The day we don’t is most certainly our last one.
