Education

What is Education?
Education can be defined many different ways to different people. According to the online dictionary, dictionary.com, the definition of education is the act of acquiring knowledge, developing the powers of judgment, and preparing oneself for a mature life. To me, education is learning more about oneself or the world around you. Everywhere you go you are observing different things, and experiencing new things, you are learning. Education isn’t just what you learn from your parents or at school, it is what you experience and take in on your own.
In The Dead Poets Society, education is extremely important to not only the students, but also their parents. The parents want their children to have the life they may not have had, and a pushing them towards a goal they set for them. Education means a lot to people, but most of the time, people forget that education is learned in a lot of different places than just the classroom. For the young men in The Dead Poets Society, they learned a lot about life and each other, especially Todd. He learned how to stand up for himself at the end, and how to express himself during class with poetry. Todd gained that knowledge from Mr. Keating, who taught the students inside the classroom, and out. As seen in The Dead Poets Society, knowledge is not just taught inside the classroom by a teacher, it is also gained from your peers, especially your family, in any location.
In Mark Twain’s Two Ways of Seeing the River, he talks about how water has become a wonderful book that is a dead language to uneducated passengers. It has a new story everyday for someone to read as a cherished secret. It also talks about how he had mastered the language of the water, and knew every feature that came to the river. In ways of dealing with education, it shows how something so simple as a river, can teach people about life. Normally, someone wouldn't look to a river, or any body of water, for answers or knowledge, but in Two Ways of Seeing the River, it does. By listening to the river speak, he learned a lot about poetry and what it symbolized.
In Malcohm X and Alex Haley's How I Discovered Words:A Homemade Education, it talked about them not being able to express what he had wanted to. He got a hold of a dictionary, and began to read through it for two days, and not knowing which words he needed to know. After a while, he began to remember what certin words meant. The ability to read intrigued him. By doing so, he got a homemade education. Education isn't just what others teach you, it is also what you teach yourself, like how to read. He reflected upon the things he read, and saw things in a different way. Education is really what you understand about a certain topic and events.
In Loren Eisley's The Hidden Teacher, it talks about how not all of our education is learned from teachers or schools, but the ones who we would least expect. She became fascinated with a spider reacting to its surroundings when she changed it. The spider was very intelligent, and saw the world in a way that she didn't. The world isn't seen the same to different people, just like learning isn't. This article show's how you may need to put yourself in a different enviornment or situation to really see things in a different way.
Education is very important to a lot of people today, from kids to adults. Although, education is not just learned in the classroom from a teacher, but from the world and people around us. You could be learning something right now and you wouldn't even know it. Education is not just what you learn from your parents or at school, it is the experience and what you take in on your own. That is what education is.