Education & Its Importance
Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. Indeed it is. Education bridges the gap between knowledge and ignorance. My question is, do you agree?
To my fellow students, we have now come into an age wherein education is the most powerful weapon. With education, you learn how to learn. You think critically, you evaluate what you know and you find solutions to challenging problems.
At some point in our lives, we may ask ourselves, “What’s the point of solving very hard Math problems that deals with algebra, trigonometry, or even calculus?”, “Can it be used when we go out into the field after graduation?” Yes! Maybe not in our daily lives, but in our specialized fields. Remember when we solved those problems, like the integral of the square root of tangent dx, we felt like we used the entirety of our brains? We groaned, “Arghh! Akong brain cells!”
In life, It is inevitable to go through tough problems. At that very moment in an exam, you go back to everything you have learned and everything that sir discussed, if there is. After, you reflect within yourself what could have gone wrong, or what could have gone right if you studied, practiced and did your best. Isn’t this concept applied in our daily lives? Once in a while, we go back to ourselves and reflect on the things we have experienced – that is where we grow as people.
Education teaches us the value of discipline. The greatest reward in life is not in instant gratification, but in consistent hard work. We did not progress in our course such as in Math and ComSci overnight, but it was through gradual change. We practiced and practiced, studied and studied so hard for it. We were able to pass last semester because we worked hard for it. The challenge now is, will we continue the discipline this semester? How about after we graduate(if we will)?
Education as a Right
Education is a right. Do you agree? Imagine if we could see the poorest people attain education. What do you think would happen? There would be less illiterate people. Our economy would flourish. Our nation would grow more to be as nationalistic and scientific. Education should be accessible to all.
Enter commercialism. We know that education is a right. However, selfish people are seeing it as “business opportunities”. Out of a survey conducted by the National Statistics Office, says that among the out-of-school-youth aged 16 -24, 1.6 million say that they discontinued their schooling because of their family’s inability to sustain their education, while 824,000 say that it’s because of the high cost of education.
The Current School System
As we have experienced, the school system currently requires us to wake up at 5AM in the morning, go to school at 7AM, have more or less 7 subjects per day, then you go home, and do homeworks. We even have subjects that push through the curriculum even if the topic is hard and requires more time. Familiar? What has this given us?
In the Programme for international Student Assessment, the Philippines is ranked last in reading comprehension and second to the last in science and mathematics out of 79 countries.
Have you heard of Finland’s unique education system? The country is proud of its respected teachers that is within the same level as with doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Students there have no standardized test and no homework. Teachers give more time to topics which require a deeper level of understanding. My favorite? Their school hours start between 8:00 and 9:00 AM in the morning and finishes between 1:00 and 2:00 pm in the afternoon. There are 3 hours and 45 minutes of instruction each day on average. With all of these, Finland ranks among the Top 10 in reading comprehension, math and science.
Think of the endless possibilities if we create significant changes to our school’s system and curriculum. We would see more motivated students getting the sleep and rest they need. There would be more time in the family, which gives more time for discipline and good moral values to children. Students would score much better because they are not pressured with tons of workload for studying. Hence increasing the country’s scores in the international school assessments. If we start from the basic unit in the society, we might as well have a chance to develop our country. We might even solve the our social and mental issues of the country, as there is more time for students, which are the future of the nation.
To better illustrate this, I want you to imagine what a car looks like 150 years ago. You would see a Kalesa right? Going back now, it’s powered by fuel and electricity. You see the difference? In communication, in the past we had mail and telegraph, now we have phones that only take seconds. See the evolution? How about our classrooms? The school system? We go to school, learn things, take standardized tests, graduate, then get a job. If we don’t make amendments or significant change to our country’s educational system, we would be preparing ourselves for the past, and not for the future.
Colonial Mindset
For more than 300 years, we have been slaves to the Spaniards, the Americans and the Japanese. We are living our lives nowadays as if it were in the past. We go to school, absorb and learn knowledge into our heads, take exams, graduate, then look for a job. What’s more? The majority of us choose to rather work abroad than staying in this country, because of the better opportunities other countries offer than that of our own. we leave our country unprogressive and stagnant with unresolved problems. What’s the use of our education, if we are to just work on another country’s dream? How about ours? Our own nation? It becomes so easy to value a foreign culture and so easy to forget our own. It’s about time that we take a stand for the land we live in.
What We can do as the Youth
With education, we grow and better ourselves as human beings. With what we learn in the four walls of this classroom, we learn to also give importance to the struggles of the masses. The success of our community depends on us, the youth of today. Students maybe 20% of the population but they are 100% of the future. The world has progressed and today, we need leaders who think and work creatively, critically, efficiently and independently.
Let us never let our education falter for this is the key to our upbringing of positive change that lasts a lifetime. Let learning become a lifetime journey and let us use it for the betterment of our nation, our mother country.
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