Importance of Education

In order to better articulate my point, I want to tell you a little story. There once was a young boy who lived in Kenya, and he and his family could not afford the cost of education. Now, some of the people he knew could afford the cost of education, so he would follow them to school everyday without their knowledge. He would hide outside the door of a dilapidated building in a neglected part of the huge city of Nairobi that was used for a school in order to pocket the lesson that the teacher was offering. In Nairobi, the school schedule was split into two sessions—four hours in the morning and five hours in the afternoon. He would walk stealthily for five miles to school every morning and five miles home for lunch after the morning session. Then, he would walk the same five miles back to the school in order to steal the lessons he could not afford. And, of course, after the second half, he would have to walk back home without the people knowing that he was there in order to avoid persecution and humiliation. Ladies and Gentlemen, that young boy was me, and that is the type of determination and passion I have about learning and education.

Until I arrived in America four years ago, I never had the opportunity to go to school legitimately. Since then, my passion for education has grown even more tremendously. I want to succeed in this world, for both my family and myself. And because none of my family members ever had the opportunity to get a formal education, they support and depend on me to do well in school. A post high school education is important to me because it will grant me the latitude to make a comfortable living, provide me with a career that I will enjoy, and provide me the honored opportunity to provide for the welfare of my family’s future.

That brings me to my first point—the latitude to make a comfortable living. You have to understand that before the civil war occurred in Somalia, my family lived a simple and comfortable life. We had our own house, our own farm, and our own harvest and animals that we would take to the market to sell. However, our lives were turned upside down when a group of terrorists who called themselves the “UNC” broke into my family’s home and left it in shreds. In this process, the “UNC” took all of my family’s valuables. Then, they burned down our home and our farm; they completely destroyed our lives. My family was forced to seek help in different refugee camps and different countries and adapt to a completely new cultures, new languages, and certainly, new lives. We constantly had to depend on the government and charity organizations, and most of the time, we did not have enough food to last us through the month. That is why I firmly believe that a higher education is my family’s ticket out of poverty. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be rich, but I do want to have the chance to able to have a career that I will enjoy and that pays well enough to take care of my family’s needs and my desires, and we never, ever want to be forced in the situation where have to depend on the government or charity organizations for our basic needs again. Higher education is something my family and I value highly.

My second point is that higher education will provide me with the privilege to choose a career that I will enjoy; my heart is in education. I, someday, would like to experience the honors of first being a teacher, then a principal, and ultimately a superintendent of schools. I want to teach so that I can inspire as many young people as I can; I want to touch the future. I want to be a principal so that I can have even a greater impact on the education of our young people by providing a safe, secure, and spirited environment. And, I want to be a superintendent because I get the chance to wear many nice suits, and I get the chance to give speeches, which is another one of my passions.

Finally, I need to be able to contribute to the welfare of my family’s future. This is important to me because I lost some of my siblings during the civil war in Somalia. Yes, we lost our life’s savings, our belongings, our home, and our farm. Yes, my family walked countless hours in hopes of escaping a horrific war. Yes, my family had to move from country to country and from refugee camp to refugee camp to seek a safe place to dwell and food. Yes, I did not have a typical childhood, but I only see my childhood as an advantage. I say an advantage, because I know I would never have been so motivated and passionate about learning, education, and wanting to succeed in life if it had not been for those childhood hardships. I want to impact the course of humanity by contributing to the greatest thing to ever influence our human existence, and that is education. This is why I am standing before you today and telling you my story.

So you see that is just it. That is what education means to me. Education is everything. It is important. It is necessary. It is the healing for our losses and traumas. It is our hope to get our lives back. It is our light to shine brightly. It is our chance to live comfortably. It is our opportunity to have the career that I will enjoy. It is my privileged opportunity to get my family out of poverty. And finally, it is the opportunity for me to give back to a community that I dearly love. To close this, I would like to leave you with a quote from one of my mentoring teachers who writes, “[education] is the vehicle that trains and conditions our young to continue the legacy of human evolution, running the institutions that sustains the maintenance of the human species and contributing to the discovery of truths and ideals.”