My Philosophy on Education

Education is a concept that is mentioned a lot but not very often thought about in depth. What does my education actually mean? What am I supposed to get out of education? Why do I go to school every day? These are questions that we should ask ourselves. Why do we lead the lives we lead?

As an american teenager, it is required by law that I attend school each day and earn a basic education. I spend 7.5 hours in school, 5 days a week, approximately 180 days for 13 years of my life. But these numbers are not the important thing, this is just showing how the majority of a child's/ teenager's life is spent at school. 

     When I was 5 years old, my mom would drop me off every day for school and I would always cry because I didn't want to be there. One day after I continuously cried for 3 hours my mom was forced to come pick me up. That day, when she picked me up, she said something I'll never forget. She told me "You can choose to be happy, or you can choose to be unhappy, but life's going to be a whole lot easier if you choose to be happy." 

   This has become my life philosophy. I apply this to every aspect of my life, including school and my education. I have come to enjoy school and becoming educated, as it is my life right now and why hate something that is unavoidable? 

     For me, Happiness is not just an occasional feeling, it is a goal to be accomplished through hard work and by giving everything my all. In school, I have learned throughout the years that it will not benefit me to go searching for the maximum points possible, it is not the grade that is important, it's what I take away from the assignment or class. Therefore, I have and never will be simply a hoop jumper, because when you jump through the hoop you do not gain anything. This is similar to any sport, you do not practice to score a goal every time, you practice to improve your skills, and when you miss a goal, you learn from the experience. 

   

     With this class, I have taken away much more than I dreamed a history class could present. Before, I approached history as "our past", I tried to find it interesting, but to me history was all just a bunch of dead people and events in the past. I never considered how history effected my life today. Until now. I am finding myself to be "searching for truth" in many other situations that I have never second guessed before. For example, September 11th, was it Al Quaida? Was it our own government? I am now considering many different aspects of one even before coming to a conlclusion. I have learned not only about the events of the past, but about our current nation, and how to draw my own truths from the sea of facts.

    One of my weaknesses is my reading skills; I often spend too much time on the small details and not enough on finding the big picture. By devoting myself to improving, my reading speed and comprehension has increased significantly with help from the reading strategies suggested when reading 40 pages of a history textbook. I try to be a scholar, not just a hoop-jumper. I do not do the assignments to get them done, I do them to learn and improve upon my weaknesses. If I know that I have a weakness in a particular area, such as reading, I will consciously try to improve. 

I found that I liked being able to assess myself on the tests and quizzes, not because I could give myself the score I wanted, but because I knew what I was thinking. If I had written something completely random, and I truly did not know the answer, I could mark it down, not getting points for it. I think I was generally pretty hard on myself because I'd rather loose points for something and actually think it through to learn it, than just change an answer to gain points. Also I liked self-assessing because hearing what the answer should be and comparing it to my own is a lot more valuable to me than just getting an answer marked wrong and not knowing the correct answer.
 Overall I try to be a scholar and know that everything happens for a purpose, if I get a low grade on a test, it's not the points that matter, it's the knowledge I gain from it. Education is one of the things in life that is priceless and yet we have complete control over it, so why wouldn't we take advantage of it?