Question
Your Task
Your job in this essay is to answer the question, “What is the purpose of education?” by telling a story from your own life. You have already had a lifetime’s worth of experiences learning—some things you have learned formally—in the classroom, on sports teams, as part of ensembles and youth groups—while other lessons have been informal (things you picked up from your family, your friends, people you follow on social media). While you will have a number of ways you could answer the question, for Essay 1, you need to select just one response that you believe is true, and tell a story from your life to help illustrate why this is the case.
Using below activity, select one experience from your own life that helps explain how you answer the question “What is the purpose of education?” After you have settled on the story you want to share with us in this essay, use the following prompts to help you write this essay.
1) I believe that everyone in the U.S. has/does not have an equal opportunity to be educated.
2) I believe that acquiring an education makes/does not make the American dream possible to achieve.
3) I believe everyone has the right/does not have the right to a quality education.
4) I believe that the purpose of education is …
5) I believe that the most valuable kind of education happens in …
6) I believe that the purpose of schooling in America is …
7) I believe that college is for everyone/those who …
8) What matters most about any school is …
9) The responsibility for educating children lies primarily with …
10) Higher education should/should not be accessible to anyone who wants it.
Genre
Reflective Personal Narrative is a genre in which you tell a story in order to illustrate your thinking about some specific question or issue.
- The personal narrative part means that this is an essay that communicates its meaning to the reader primarily through a story drawn from your own life. It also means that this is not an argumentative essay in which you assert a thesis and provide an argument about your view.
- The reflective part means that you don’t want to tell just any story, but a story that can help your reader understand your convictions or values about education. Don’t take the invention activities for this essay lightly: selecting the right story is a big part of reflection.
Purpose
The purpose of this essay is two-fold. The first purpose is reflective, for you to reflect on your experiences in order to start to articulate your values and goals for your own education. The second purpose is revelatory: you are sharing part of your story with your classmates to help them get to know you and to work towards building our learning community.
Audience
Because one of the purposes of this assignment is for you to get to know the members of this learning community, your audience is your classmates. That should limit your topic selection to stories you are willing to share with people you are just getting to know. That might feel scary, so we’ll talk about how to make a good choice.
Writing Tips
- Zero in on a moment: Once, on a Saturday afternoon in late summer, I was playing basketball with my friends.
- Give it an arc: rising action—climax—falling action—resolution. The game started to get heated when some older guys showed up. They demanded we give up the court, but we refused. One of them started getting loud, and my buddy offered to play them for the court. They laughed, but agreed. That’s when we got to show off our skills. We beat them 10-6, and they had to wait until we finished our game. They asked us to stick around and play with them, and now we all play together on Saturdays.
- Find the significance, or moment of clarity, and state it clearly. I see now that it could have turned into a fight if we’d gotten angry at the loud guy. But we kept our cool and compromised, not only avoiding a conflict but also gaining some friends.
Solution
What is the Purpose of Education?
I believe that the purpose of education is to teach people the correct way to lead their life, know what they want and practice what is correct. By being educated, I do not mean having a successful career out of a highly reputed college degree. One will find many people who have college degrees and expertise but fail when it comes to leading a content life. Although in some cases, education gives one many opportunities they would not have without it; ideally, it should make a person more tolerant and open to new experiences. But mostly education just makes someone a more complete person
For instance, once I had no idea or plan on how I should treat my body with reverence and respect. Also, I was never a books person, and I always believed it was a waste of time under the pretext that ‘I could do better things in my life.’ However, it came to a time where I was not happy and content with the life I was leading, and I decided to invest some of my time into reading and self-education. After spending many hours studying highly successful people, I’ve learned that happiness comes from progress. I continue to watch and study high achievers because they’ve been able to build a life of true happiness, freedom, and abundance, which I aspire to build for myself. Their books inspire me to go after my dreams because they inspire my ability through the stories they write and show. This is a decision I made after watching ‘The Secret” about four years ago …………for help with this assignment contact us via Email Address: consulttutor10@gmail.com