Educate

I hate my environmental science course. I hate it so much, not necessarily because of the topic, because I have considered minoring in environmental science, but because the structure of the class is awful. Youtube videos take up the majority of the class time; these are the videos with terrible graphics and monotone old men. It's hard to resist the urge to spend the entire period on my cell phone, scrolling feeds and blowing my friends phones up with emojis to show how bored I am. Sometimes I cave. Sometimes I look at the girls next to me and judge them, judge them bad. They can spend the entire lecture hunched over their cell phones, and after 50 minutes of Twitter updates and group texts, they'll look up from their screens and have the audacity to say to me:

"I hate this class. I don't understand anything. Do we have homework? I hate school."

"I hate school."

I see it on my Twitter feed:

"why cant i be a prisoner they dont have to do homework"

"Homework: because 7 hours of school wasn't enough."

"Walk into school like whaddup i wanna die"

"Alcohol >>> Class"

I hear it in the classroom:

"Duuuude, this Friday class had been the first one I've been to all week."

"Bro, that's the shit."

I was searching through the souvenir keychains at a gas station in Las Vegas last weekend and I stumbled across a keychain embroidered with these words. These three words have been made into a product, sold and bought. It made me stop and think back to a TED talk I watched a month earlier. Here is the link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/shabana_basij_rasikh_dare_to_educate_afghan_girls.html

After watching this video, I wanted to slap myself because I am guilty of being unappreciative when it comes to my education. How dare I complain? How dare I advocate negative feelings toward my education?

It is cliche to say that, as a society, we do not appreciate the education that we are given. But cliches are cliches for a reason. And this topic is not addressed enough. In the society that we live in, our education is not a privilege - it's something we must pursue, and if we do not, we will end up flipping burgers at McDonalds, working a job we hate. We will fail. Most of society's pursuit for education is driven by consequences, not the hunger for knowledge; the same hunger felt by the Afghan women in the TED talk, risking their lives for an education taught underground, entirely out of sight. Something needs to change.