How has education shaped us?

By Carla López, 9th Grade

To become successful in life, most people in society believe education is the base for it. As kids, we are told we need to get good grades in order to be someone in life, not only that but the pressure of it feels surreal like if we fail a subject the world will end. That’s absolutely fake. Going to school at a tender age also affects how we act or react to certain things; it builds our personality and vision of the world. The way you were educated can also influence your thoughts on social issues. Basically, your education might be the main reason why you are how you are even though people might think it doesn’t influence anything at all.

Critical thinking helps us live day by day. Critical thinking allows us to solve problems by ourselves and come to conclusions about our own beliefs. Education provides us with the potential to be able to do that but how does it influence us? It can influence the fact that if your teacher at school thinks in a certain way you as a little kid will think exactly the same. We get to the point at which we don’t know if our way of thinking is really just based on our own beliefs.

In 2017, a research team found that education in early life didn’t have a large impact on learning something new at various points in time. Besides, education from a higher level may help cognitive deterioration at an older age. With this data, we can conclude that education is in fact like exercise to our mind and not only teaches us things we find unnecessary but also keeps us with the ability of reasoning at an older age.

If higher education influences people in a better way, what about people with a lower education? Your first thought might be that people with lower education are not as polite or intelligent as people that had the privilege to have a better education in more expensive schools. That’s not true at all. Quality in education does not influence many other aspects though. It is proved by researchers that people with a lower education learn new tasks nearly as well as people with higher education.

Education also opens our minds to human error. Learning about history helps us to know what we think about those mistakes and people and actions that are considered to be bad. We learn about our human rights like voting, freedom, equality, and many more. Here’s where education can influence your thoughts on your rights. When learning about them you start to know if you are in favor or not, if you disagree with something or agree with it. It also depends on the people you are around. We see most of the effects of education’s influence on politics. The difference in education in different people is the result of the different political understanding each person has. People with lower education tend to not be as informed on politics as people with higher education, affecting the country as a whole.

Education is indeed an important part of our lives and helps us get a better perspective of the world while shaping us into the person we are today. Overall, it has a big influence on our lives and we probably wouldn’t be who we are today without it.

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