For Granted

 

Education is not something to be taken for granted. In my book club book, Educated, in many other book club books based on the blog posts I have read recently, and in real life, this is a common theme. 

Many of us, myself included, are guilty of taking our education for granted. It’s easy, considering most of us haven’t had any extreme circumstances in our lives. For most of us, we wake up 10 minutes before class every morning, hop onto our zoom calls, leave our cameras off, and scroll through our phones while our teachers’ voices drone on and on. School feels like a chore, a burden, and a single day off feels like a miracle. 

Or the complete opposite. We work extremely hard at school, taking every single AP course there is to take, studying hours and hours each day (especially with AP exams this week), feeling more and more validated with each academic success. Nothing else matters. But still, in this case, school feels a weight on our shoulders we cannot wait to be lifted out from under.

It is so hard to be appreciative of something so normal to us.

But for so many other people, including Tara Westover, school is not a privilege, a burden, a weight. School is nonexistent. It is inaccessible, for so many reasons. For Tara, it is her family who stopped her from getting an education. It was her government-fearing father and her pushover mother who relieved her from ever experiencing the burden of school. Except for her, it wasn’t a burden. It was a privilege. It was something she had always wanted to experience. It was something she could use to escape her life, to flee the abuse she was experiencing at home. To others like Tara, school is a gift. 

But we never really get to experience that gift, if we keep taking it for granted. As these last few weeks of school close out, we should start enjoying school and actively learning, instead of just going through the motions. Taking our education into our own hands and making the most out of it, is a lesson we need to carry with us till the end of our education.