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The Value of Education

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I place a great value on education and real learning (not indoctrination); it is a process that has had a great impact upon my own life and the lives of many I know. There is a joy in the discovery and discussion of new ideas, facts and thoughts. It has, truly, the power to change lives, to liberate minds and to truly revolutionize the world...if only you let it!

The process of education has, for me, been not only a life-changing, mind-liberating process, but it has been the process of helping to give me the tools that I need to get me through life; not mere information, but the tools of learning. These are the basic devices that any educated person needs; good reading skills, good writing skills, the ability to sort out useful information from nonsense in all its guises.

Perhaps most important of all is the humbling realization of my college years; the fact of the matter is, the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. Every fact illuminates three further areas in which I know nothing, every new branch of knowledge that I find has two more waiting in the wings. It is a humbling, and a very exciting, realization to have. Only in the past two days I've been made aware of my ignorance of the substance of Joseph Campbell's work, of my utter lack of knowledge about Joseph Faraday and Sergei Winogradsky. Reading Machiavelli's The Prince has made me realize just how little I know about Italian history; reading Peter Ward has made me realize my near total lack of knowledge about sea level rise, past and future. These are all gaps that, having now been made aware of them, I will seek to close. However, I proceed in the knowledge that in filling those gaps, further gaps will be made known to me and I will seek to fill them. For education is a process, or at least should be, one that doesn't stop after four years but continues on for the rest of life.

This is both the drawback and sheer joy of learning; I become aware of how little I know as I learn more. But this is a challenge, a call to adventure, not something that should make one give up the quest as futile. There is an entire world out there to discover. What better way to spend one's own life than working to illuminate what may be even a small part of it, to come to understand a little better this world we all share?
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