Summer is close and school is becoming more stressful as it draws near. As projects and final papers are almost due, and the stress of it all grips you with anxiety and fear. When all the work becomes so overwhelming that you start having funny thoughts about life, questions begin to pop into your head about the end goal of all of the stress. You ask yourself questions like, why am I in school? What is the main reason of being in college? Is going to college primarily to get a good job in order to make money? Or is it to gain knowledge that improves your critical thinking? Everyone needs to ask themselves these questions, as they allow one to have an idea what their stress is for. You need to know the reason behind the things you put yourself through so you don't become weary and tired of it
I have realized recently that most people send their kids to college just as an investment. They send their children to college in order for them to get good jobs to make money, but is that what college is all about? Is college all about just getting a good job and making money? Has money become the end goal of why we are learning? If making money has become the end goal of your education, I believe you are just wasting your time and money. I asked 10 people if they would drop out of school if they won the lottery, and 8 out of 10 people said yes!
But there is so much more to being in college than just getting a good job in order to make money. There are so many beautiful things one can learn from being in college. There are relationships to building with people. In college, especially at Lee University, you get to broaden your horizons by meeting other people from other cultures, going on cultural development and service trips all over the world. So getting an education goes just beyond making money,
I believe getting a good education in college gives one the ability to think, act, and create. Being in college allows us to be innovative, and it allows us have a wider worldview so we can help change the world.
Dubois said: "We are training not isolated men but a living group of men,—nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick-mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,— not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold." In college we are not prepared and trained just to make money but to become men and women. We are trained to become better humans who are not just after filling their pockets but who have a real desire to change the world.
The purpose of education is not to train men and women for business, but to train them for life, or in other words, prepare them to confront the whole of the world, not just their immediate environment. We should use education to seek truth, beauty, and freedom, not money. Money would only you take you so far, but ideals and principles would be with you for life. So let's change our mindset about college and education. Let us have a mindset to get rid of ignorance by learning for the purpose of being upright and broadminded global citizens.
