Education Really Counts

Pre-reading note: Upon re-reading what I wrote, the first paragraph sounds really arrogant, but I think it makes more sense once you finish the post. Tell me what you think, and feel free to disagree!

I'll get straight to the point of this post. Moriah and I were at Lakeside the other evening for Ariel's birthday, and I was startled by the number of people there who clearly lacked education. And I don't mean in the sense that they seemed to actually be unintelligent. It was just the way they spoke with crude language, the way they didn't seem to be able to take care of their appearances, the way none of them displayed any evidence of dental hygeine. I mean seriously, at least 40 percent of the adults there were missing teeth! It was easy to tell who they were by their general behavior, by the way they carried themselves, by their unkempt appearances. There was the man who was either drunk, mentally disabled, or had a faulty inner ear, I couldn't tell which, but his sense of balance and movement was so off it could have been any one of them. There was a girl who took out her anger at the world by kicking a trashcan. There were the two teenaged girls who were the same age as us but who looked years older. Need I continue? A lot of these people are a whole lot poorer than any of us will ever be. And you know what else I noticed? An awful lot of them were black or latino. Not all of them, but a lot of them. I wonder what those demographics says about our educational and social systems. Are we truly the country of equality we say we are?

I know we are all thankful for the world we were born into. I don't mean earth, or humanity. I mean the world of the affluent, at least relatively affluent compared to the rest of the world. You might not think of yourself as rich, but compare yourself to others sometime. And you don't have to go to war-torn Sudan or famine-ravished Bangladesh to get a shock at the inequality. Look right here in this country; you'll find plenty of people who'd love to have had half the luck you did when you were born into your financially secure familes. But I wonder, how often to you thank God or natural selection or whatever you belive in for the education you're getting? Maybe you do every day. But have you ever just taken for granted the fact that you get a darn good school experience that will mean the difference between being successful in life and, well, failing? I know I have. How many of you will go to college? All of you. How many of the people I saw the other night went to college or will go in the near future? Maybe half. My parents have five college degrees between them. A lot of the people I saw probably didn't have one. I'm not asking you to go out and fix the nation's unjust educational and social systems. But next time you're annoyed at a teacher, tired of a homework assignment, or just fed up with school in general, take a moment to think about how lucky you are. I know I'll be trying to keep a more accurate perspective of the world open as I enter high school next year, and I hope you'll make the same effort.