education for essays

Essays About Education: 20 Topic Ideas For Students

Is education important? These 20 essays about education indicate that it is, and they are a great place to start with crafting your essay. 

In America alone, over 50.7 million students attend public schools. The role of education in society impacts nearly every family in the country, and for that reason, it is a vital topic to discuss. 

An educated population can meet its challenges head-on with a greater ability to problem-solve. Yet sometimes, writing essays about education importance is challenging for writers.

This topic is one that most people can agree on, but few people can define and expound on. If you need to write an essay on the education system and is important to society but need an essay writing prompt, this list is a good place to start. Read on to discover 20 essays about education’s importance to spark your writing creativity.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers !

1. Education Helps Reduce Hunger

2. the importance of education on maternal health and child survival rate, 3. the importance of education for economic growth in a community, 4. how education empowers females in a community, 5. education reduces the risk of violent extremism, 6. the impact of education on the environment, 7. the importance of education for me, 8. educated people tend to be good citizens, 9. is education the key to success, 10. education is a key to improved mental health, 11. the importance of early childhood education, 12. education helps keep people out of prison, 13. education is good for the economy, 14. education is the key to independence, 15. what is an educated person, 16. eduction exposes students to diversity, 17. education teaches critical thinking skills, 18. the importance of earning a college degree, 19. the importance of education on social development, 20. how education builds character.

Did you know there is a tie between having a good education and having enough to eat? In one study of children in Nairobi, researchers found that a mother’s education significantly impacted whether or not the child would have problems with hunger. The more educated the mother, the better fed the child.

This problem is a complex one. Parental education impacts a child’s nutritional status, but a child’s nutritional status impacts their ability to learn. Human beings need their basic needs met first before focusing on learning about the world, so hungry children will miss out on key learning components in their academic years. This essay topic has many directions you can take it. You can focus on the importance of education to reduce the risk of hunger and the importance of nutrition to improve education outcomes.

Statistics show that children who have educated mothers are two times as likely to survive to school age than those who have uneducated mothers. Children born to mothers with 12 years of education are 30% less likely to die before reaching kindergarten than those born to mothers who have no education. Your essay could focus on the importance of education, especially female education, in that it protects the next generation from an early death. In your essay, you can explore the many reasons behind this connection.

For example, educated mothers will know more about child development and appropriate interventions in early childhood than those who are less educated. They are also more likely to have their children vaccinated against childhood illnesses than mothers who lack a high school or college education.

If you want to see a community develop a better economic status, then you need to see an improvement in its education system. An educated population is a key component of steady economic growth within a community. Your importance of education essay can discuss why this is.

When someone is educated, their income earning potential increases; when the people have more money, society also does. You can expand on statistics like this as you build this essay topic.

Diversity and gender inclusivity are important topics in modern society, and education may be a key component. When women learn to be independent financially, they can take control of their life. In addition, educated females reduce the risk of child mortality, as previously discussed, which benefits the community as a whole.

Women who are educated can better protect their health because they have more information about nutrition and healthcare. They also tend to receive better prenatal care when pregnant, which reduces maternal fatalities. This financial independence and improved overall healthcare make education vital for the modern woman, and you can write about this in your essay.

Violent extremism, especially among religious groups, can catalyst everything from riots to wars. Poor education or no education can limit a student’s worldview to a very defined area, making them prime candidates for extremist philosophies.

Education seems to reduce the rates of extremism and raise a generation across the globe that counters these extreme views. With improved education, rates of terrorism and radical extremism may go down. The population has become more economically stable and culturally tolerant. Your essay can expound on these facts and suggest ways to improve education in challenged countries to reduce global terrorism problems.

As you look at why education matters, one surprising point to consider is the impact of education on the environment. In traditional education, teachers can educate students about environmental concerns and how they can take steps to protect the environment for future generations. In addition, people who hold degrees are statistically more likely to adopt pro-environment behaviors in their lives and business as adults.

This essay prompt can be an interesting idea for someone passionate about the environment. You can explore the idea of environmental education in the classroom and that degree-holders are more environmentally responsible than those who do not hold degrees. Both avenues will show the importance of education in building an eco-friendly community.

Many essays on the importance of education focus on the importance to society, but you can take a more personal approach to the benefits of education. This essay can discuss why education is important to you as an individual. What do you hope to accomplish with a proper education that you could not do without one?

For this topic, go beyond simply saying something broad like you want to “change the world” or focus on the “betterment of society.” Instead, make it personal. Dig into why education is the key to success for you, personally. This self-awareness will be something the reader will appreciate.

If you want a peaceful, helpful society, you need to focus on education. People with higher education are more politically active than those with minimal education. They are also more likely to file a complaint if they notice something unsafe or undesirable in their community.

In this essay, you could explore some of these statistics. Then, you could consider why educated citizens are good citizens. Finally, you could discuss how communities can continue to support education to create young people who contribute positively to the greater society.

This essay question is a good starting point because the idiom is common. To answer the question, you must first define what you mean by education and success, then show whether or not someone can be a success without education.

For many, this is a complex question. Education can play a key role in a person’s life, but is it the only key to success, or does the person need tenacity, grit, and ingenuity? This essay is an opinion piece, so decide what your opinion is and then start writing.

The modern world puts quite a bit of stress on people. Interestingly, researchers have found that higher levels of education lead to improved mental health . In your essay, you can discuss why this might be, but keep in mind that this can be a difficult relationship to pin down. The actual reason why it is true may not be something you can find.

Education is closely related to life outcomes, and improved employment and income status often lead to improved mental health. Educated people have more choices about their life paths than uneducated people, and these choices lead to better overall control over their livelihoods. As you consider this connection, you can discuss all of these in your essay.

Many education essays focus on the over-arching idea of the value of education. This essay topic will look a little more closely at an important segment of education. Children with a solid foundation of early education are better equipped to start their school journeys. These years are when children learn social and emotional skills that will help them in later classroom experiences.

The early childhood classroom also lays the groundwork for teaching children that they can learn from someone other than mom or dad. The early childhood classroom adds a layer of intervention to screen children for developmental delays and disorders that may require treatment to make education successful in later years.

While educated and uneducated people alike can end up in jail, statistics show that a good education reduces that risk significantly. The Bureau of Justice Studies found that 41% of people in jail have only some high school education or even less. These statistics show a clear correlation between education and serving jail time.

In your essay, you can discuss why this is. What is it about education that helps keep people operating within the bounds of the law? You can then tie in the importance of education as a safeguard against both unlawful behavior and incarceration.

As already mentioned in previous essay topics, educated people are more likely to be able to get a job that they enjoy.  Community-wide education reduces the number of poor people in most communities. When people have an education, they can get a good-paying job more quickly. These jobs benefit the economy in two ways. First, good-paying jobs put more money into the community to spend. Fewer people in low-income brackets mean fewer people depending on government support, which costs the government money. Discuss this for an interesting essay topic.

For people to grow into independent adults with a good quality of life, they likely need some education. While you will find rags to riches stories of people who made it big without school, most people who have a good job start with a good education. A good job is a starting point to independence because it cares for the financial aspects of life, and thus education seems to be a key to independence as an adult.

This essay topic requires some development, but you can take it quite far if you make an effort. By showing how education is the key to economic stability on an individual level, you can show that it is the key to independence.

Does all education take place in the classroom? Can someone become an educated person without stepping foot in one? If you want to discuss the importance of education, this is a key starting point.

Defining an educated person can help you determine how powerful education is. It can also allow you to discover different avenues of education possible for the modern student. Remember, education is important, but it may not look the same for every person.

One of the benefits of education is the chance that the right school and curriculum have to teach students about other people groups and cultures. This, in turn, creates adults who are more tolerant of people who think or behave differently than them. Of course, this benefit is only possible if the student attends a diverse school or uses a culturally sensitive curriculum, but it is possible.

You could write a lengthy essay on diversity in the classroom and its importance in helping children succeed as adults. You could also discuss how teachers and schools can improve diversity, even if they can’t add more diverse students to their student bodies. With some creativity, most teachers and parents can find ways to incorporate diversity within the classroom and add this important component to their educational goals.

Education, especially higher education, doesn’t just teach facts. It teaches students how to think for themselves. These critical thinking skills can be hard to learn in real life without some training, so education is so important.

Your essay can point out some critical thinking skills school students pick up on in their schooling. You can also take about how to add critical thinking in an age-appropriate manner. Finally, you can discuss what critical thinking skills are most important to add to the curriculum.

Many of these essays on the importance of education focus primarily on high school education and below, but a college education is also important to many individuals. You can craft an interesting essay on the benefits of or importance of earning a college degree. Since some people argue that college is no longer important, this essay topic gives you a platform to explore a more controversial topic and exhibit your persuasive essay skills.

Be open to different perspectives as you write this one. While a college degree is often vital to a career, there are careers you can pursue without one. Explain the importance of education at the college level, but don’t be afraid to mention that some people won’t need to take their education that far.

Education today goes beyond simply teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. It also teaches children how to work with one another in social environments. It teaches them to be good citizens, both local and global communities.

All of these are vital to the social development of young children. Your essay can explore the different ways school and the school environment help teach children how to be social creatures, share with others, work with others, handle conflict, and deal with big emotions.

Can you think of a time in your education when things didn’t go as planned? Maybe you had a teacher who was harder on you than was necessary. Perhaps there was a concept that you could not seem to grasp, no matter how hard you tried. These experiences build character, which is why education is so important.

This essay topic can be personal if you wish it to be. You can look at how education built your character by teaching you to persevere when the going got tough. Or, you could keep it broad and discuss ways education teaches character development. Either way, you can build a solid case for the importance of education to help develop and mold a child’s character.  

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Nicole Harms has been writing professionally since 2006. She specializes in education content and real estate writing but enjoys a wide gamut of topics. Her goal is to connect with the reader in an engaging, but informative way. Her work has been featured on USA Today, and she ghostwrites for many high-profile companies. As a former teacher, she is passionate about both research and grammar, giving her clients the quality they demand in today's online marketing world.

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Best Education Essays of 2021: Our 15 Most Discussed Columns About Schools, COVID Slide, Learning Recovery & More

A full calendar year of education under COVID-19 and its variants gave rise to a wave of memorable essays in 2021, focusing both on the ongoing damage done and how to mitigate learning loss going forward.

While consensus emerged around several key themes — the need for extensive, in-depth tutoring, the possibilities presented by unprecedented millions in federal relief dollars for schools, the opportunity for education reimagined — there was far less agreement on whether to remediate or accelerate, which health and safety measures schools should employ, even how dire the shortage of teachers and school staff really is. 

From grade-level standards and hygiene theater to lessons from the Spanish flu and homeschooling, here are the 15 most read and buzzed-about essays of 2021:

Analysis: Focus on Grade-Level Standards or Meet Students Where They Are? How an Unintentional Experiment Guided a Strategy for Addressing Learning Loss

Learning Recovery: What’s the best way to support learning recovery in middle-grade math? Should schools stay focused on grade-level standards while trying to address critical learning gaps as best as they can? Or should they systematically address individual students’ unfinished learning from prior years so they can ultimately catch back up — even if that means spending meaningful time teaching below-grade skills? As educators and administrators wrestle with those questions as they prepare to return to school in the fall, contributor Joel Rose offers some guidance inadvertently found in a study of Teach to One , an innovative learning model operated by New Classrooms Innovation Partners, the nonprofit where he is co-founder and CEO. That research found performance in schools with accountability systems that focused on grade-level proficiency (and thus prioritized grade-level exposure) grew 7 percentile points, while those that operated under systems that rewarded student growth (and thus prioritized individual student needs) grew 38 points. While the study was never intended to compare results across schools in this way, the stark difference between the two groups could not be ignored. Math is cumulative, and the path to proficiency often requires addressing unfinished learning from prior years. For the middle grades, administrators and policymakers would be wise to question the grade-level-only gospel as they begin to plan students’ educational recovery. Read the full analysis . 

Lessons from Spanish Flu — Babies Born in 1919 Had Worse Educational, Life Outcomes Than Those Born Just Before or After. Could That Happen With COVID-19?

History: Contributor Chad Aldeman has some bad news: The effects of COVID-19 are likely to linger for decades. And if the Spanish Flu is any indication, babies born during the pandemic may suffer some devastating consequences . Compared with children born just before or after, babies born during the flu pandemic in 1919 were less likely to finish high school, earned less money and were more likely to depend on welfare assistance and serve time in jail. The harmful effects were twice as large for nonwhite children. It may take a few years to see whether similar educational and economic effects from COVID-19 start to materialize, but these are ominous findings suggesting that hidden economic factors may influence a child’s life in ways that aren’t obvious in the moment. Hopefully, they will give policymakers more reasons to speed economic recovery efforts and make sure they deliver benefits to families and children who are going to need them the most. Read the full essay .

Pittman & Darling-Hammond: Surveys Find Parents Want Bold Changes in Schools — With More Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom

Future of Education: Whatever they thought of their schools before the pandemic struck, parents now have strong opinions about what they want them to provide. They are looking beyond fall reopenings to rethink schooling, and they care about having good choices for interest-driven learning opportunities beyond the classroom . Two national parent surveys released in May shed new light on how to think about the often-used phrase “more and better learning.” Among the key findings, write contributors Karen Pittman and Linda Darling-Hammond: Parents want bold changes in schools, to make public education more equitable and learner-centered. But they also believe that home, school and extracurriculars play complementary roles in imparting the broad set of skills children need for their future success. This means educators and policymakers must support learning that extends beyond the school day, the school walls, the school staff and the traditional school approaches. Read the full essay .

High-Quality, High-Dosage Tutoring Can Reduce Learning Loss. A Blueprint for How Washington, States & Districts Can Make It Happen

Personalized Learning: There is near-unanimous, bipartisan agreement that tutoring is among the most promising, evidence-based strategies to help students struggling with learning loss . Decades of rigorous evaluations have consistently found that tutoring programs yield large, positive effects on math and reading achievement, and can even lead to greater social and motivational outcomes. It isn’t just the research community buzzing about tutoring — it is gaining momentum in policy circles, too. Which means there is a real opportunity — and responsibility — to design and deliver tutoring programs in a way that aligns with the research evidence, which is fortunately beginning to tell us more than just “tutoring works.” Contributors Sara Kerr and Kate Tromble of Results for America lay out a blueprint for how Washington, states and local school districts can make high-quality, high-dosage tutoring happen .

COVID-19 Raised Fears of Teacher Shortages. But the Situation Varies from State to State, School to School & Subject to Subject

Teacher Pipeline: Is the U.S. facing a major teacher shortage? Relatively low pay, a booming private sector and adverse working conditions in schools are all important elements in whether teaching is becoming an undesirable profession. But, writes contributor Dan Goldhaber, the factors that lead to attrition are diverse, so treating teachers as a monolith doesn’t help in crafting solutions to the real staffing challenges that some schools face. There is no national teacher labor market per se, because each state adopts its own rules for pay, licensure, tenure, pension and training requirements. And nationally, tens of thousands more people are prepared to teach than there are available positions. But while some schools have applicants lined up when an opening becomes available, others, typically those serving economically disadvantaged students, draw far fewer candidates. And schools tend to struggle to find teachers with special education or STEM training. The pandemic certainly raises concerns about teacher shortages; what is needed is a more nuanced conversation about teacher staffing to come up with more effective solutions to real problems. Read the full essay .

Clash of Cultures, Clash of Privilege — What Happened When 30 Low-Income Students of Color Were Admitted to Elite Prep Schools

Analysis: Programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance have long been regarded as groundbreaking solutions to the lack of diversity in the nation’s most elite prep schools. Teens who join these types of programs undergo a transfer of privilege that starts with their education and bleeds into every facet of their lives, forever altering their trajectory with opportunities that otherwise would likely be unattainable. But what assumptions do these programs subscribe to? And what lessons can be found in the experiences of the participants? In her Harvard senior thesis, contributor Jessica Herrera Chaidez followed 30 participants in a program that grants select socioeconomically disadvantaged students of color in the Los Angeles area the opportunity to attend famed independent schools. She found that the experiences of these students can be understood in various forms of twoness associated with this transfer of privilege, an internal struggle that begins with their introduction to the world of elite education and will come to mark them for their entire lives in a way that they aren’t even able to comprehend yet. Read more about her findings, and what some of these students had to say .

Steiner & Wilson: Some Tough Questions, and Some Answers, About Fighting COVID Slide While Accelerating Student Learning

Case Study: How prepared are district leaders, principals and teachers as they work to increase learning readiness for on-grade work this fall? That’s the question posed by contributors David Steiner and Barbara Wilson in a case study examining how a large urban district sought to adapt materials it was already using to implement an acceleration strategy for early elementary foundational skills in reading . Among the insights to be drawn: First, planning is critical. Leaders need to set out precisely how many minutes of instruction will be provided, the exact learning goals and the specific materials; identify all those involved (tutors, specialists, and teachers); and give them access to shared professional development on the chosen acceleration strategies. Second, this requires a sea change from business as usual, where teachers attempt to impart skill-based standards using an eclectic rather than a coherent curriculum. It is not possible to accelerate children with fragmented content. All efforts to prepare students for grade-level instruction must rest on fierce agreement about the shared curriculum to be taught in classrooms. What we teach is the anchor that holds everything else in place. Read the full essay .

Schools Are Facing a Surge of Failing Grades During the Pandemic — and Traditional Approaches Like Credit Recovery Will Not Be Enough to Manage It

Student Supports: Earlier this year, failing grades were on the rise across the country — especially for students who are learning online — and the trend threatened to exacerbate existing educational inequities. The rise in failing grades appears to be most pronounced among students from low-income households, multilingual students and students learning virtually . This could have lasting consequences: Students with failing grades tend to have less access to advanced courses in high school, and a failing grade in even one ninth-grade course can lower a student’s chances of graduating on time. Addressing the problem, though, won’t be easy. In many school systems, the rash of failed courses could overwhelm traditional approaches to helping students make up coursework they may have missed. In a new analysis, Betheny Gross, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, implored school and district leaders to be especially wary of one long-established but questionable practice: credit recovery. Read more about her warning — as well as her recommendations for how districts should seek to reverse this learning loss .

Riccards: The 1776 Report Is a Political Document, Not a Curriculum. But It Has Something to Teach Us

Analysis: The 1776 Report was never intended to stand as curriculum, nor was it designed to be translated into a curriculum as the 1619 Project was. It is a political document offered by political voices. But, writes contributor Patrick Riccards, dismissing it would be a mistake, because it provides an important lesson . The American record, whether it be measured starting in 1619 or 1776, is hopeful and ugly, inspiring and debilitating, a shining beacon and an unshakable dark cloud. American history is messy and contradictory; how we teach it, even more so. For years, we have heard how important it is to increase investment in civics education. But from #BlackLivesMatter to 2020 electioneering to even the assault on the U.S. Capitol, the basics of civics have been on display in our streets and corridors of power. What we lack is the collective historical knowledge necessary to translate civic education into meaningful, positive community change. The 1776 Report identifies beliefs espoused by our Founding Fathers and many Confederates and reflected by those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. They are a part of our history that we must study, understand, contextualize and deconstruct. The 1776 Report becomes the proper close to the social studies lessons of the past four years. As the next chapter of American history is written, it is imperative to apply those lessons to significantly improve the teaching and learning of American history. Our nation’s future depends on better understanding our past .

There’s Lots of Education Data Out There — and It Can Be Misleading. Here Are 6 Questions to Ask

Student Data: Data is critical to addressing inequities in education. However, it is often misused, interpreted to fit a particular agenda or misread in ways that perpetuate an inaccurate story . Data that’s not broken down properly can hide gaps between different groups of students. Facts out of context can lead to superficial conclusions or deceptive narratives. In this essay, contributor Krista Kaput presents six questions that she asks herself when consuming data — and that you should, too .

Educators’ View: Principals Know Best What Their Schools Need. They Should Have a Central Role in Deciding How Relief Funds Are Spent

School Funding: The American Rescue Plan represents a once-in-a-generation federal commitment to K-12 schools across the country. The impact will be felt immediately: The $122 billion in direct funding will support safe school reopenings, help ensure that schools already providing in-person instruction can safely stay open and aid students in recovering from academic and mental health challenges induced and exacerbated by the pandemic. How these funds are distributed will shape the educational prospects of millions of students, affecting the country for decades to come. As they make rescue plan funding decisions, write contributors L. Earl Franks of the National Association of Elementary School Principals and Ronn Nozoe of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, states and districts should meaningfully engage and empower school principals throughout all phases of implementation. Principals, as leaders of their school buildings and staff, have unequaled insights into their individual schools’ needs and know which resources are required most urgently. Read the authors’ four recommendations for leveraging this expertise .

Case Studies: How 11 States Are Using Emergency Federal Funds to Make Improvements in College and Career Access That Will Endure Beyond the Pandemic

COVID Relief: The Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund gave states more than $4 billion in discretionary federal dollars to support K-12 schools, higher education and workforce initiatives. These were welcome resources, coming just as the pandemic accelerated unemployment and exacerbated declining college enrollment, hitting those from low-income backgrounds hardest. But as contributors Betheny Gross, Georgia Heyward and Matt Robinson note, most states have invested overwhelmingly in one-time college scholarships or short-term supports that will end once funds run out. In hopes of encouraging policymakers across the country to make more sustainable investments with the remaining relief funds, the trio spotlights efforts in 11 states that show promise in enduring beyond COVID-19. Read our full case study . 

In Thousands of Districts, 4-Day School Weeks Are Robbing Students of Learning Time for What Amounts to Hygiene Theater

School Safety: Last April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made clear that having good ventilation and wearing masks consistently are far more effective at preventing the spread of COVID-19 than disinfecting surfaces. This clarification was long overdue, say contributors Robin Lake and Georgia Heyward of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, as scientists had long suspected that deep cleaning and temperature checks are more hygiene theater than a strategy for limiting the spread of an airborne virus. Thousands of school districts, however, had already built complex fall reopening plans with a full day for at-home learning. The result was a modified four-day week with students receiving significantly reduced live instruction. Eliminating a full day of in-person teaching was always a high-cost strategy from an education standpoint; now there is confirmation that it was totally unnecessary. Lake and Heyward argue that we cannot afford to throw away an entire day of learning and student support based on a false scientific premise .

Teacher’s View: How the Science of Reading Helped Me Make the Most of Limited Time With My Students & Adapt Lessons to Meet Their Needs

First Person: March 12, 2020, was contributor Jessica Pasik’s last typical day in the classroom before COVID-19 changed everything. When her district closed, she assumed, as did many, that it was a temporary precaution. But with each passing week, she worried that the growth in reading she and her first-graders had worked so hard for would fade away . Many pre-pandemic instructional approaches to teaching reading were already failing students and teachers, and the stress of COVID-19 has only exacerbated these challenges. When Pasik’s district reopened for in-person classes in the fall, they were faced with difficult decisions about how to best deliver instruction. One factor that helped streamline this transition was a grounding in the science of reading. Having extensive knowledge of what they needed to teach allowed educators to focus on how they would teach, make the most of the limited instructional time they had with students and adapt lessons to meet their needs. There are multiple factors that teachers cannot control; one person alone cannot make the systematic changes needed for all children to reach proficiency in literacy. But one knowledgeable teacher can forever change the trajectory of a student’s life. Students will face many challenges once they leave the classroom, but low literacy does not need to be one of them. Read her full essay .

Homeschooling Is on the Rise. What Should That Teach Education Leaders About Families’ Preferences?

Disenrollment: With school closures, student quarantines and tensions over mask requirements, vaccine mandates and culture war issues, families’ lives have been upended in ways few could have imagined 18 months ago. That schools have struggled to adapt is understandable, writes contributor Alex Spurrier. But for millions of families, their willingness to tolerate institutional sclerosis in their children’s education is wearing thin. Over the past 18 months, the rate of families moving their children to a new school increased by about 50 percent , and some 1.2 million switched to homeschooling last academic year. Instead of working to get schools back to a pre-pandemic normal, Spurrier says, education leaders should look at addressing the needs of underserved kids and families — and the best way to understand where schools are falling short is to look at how families are voting with their feet. If options like homeschooling, pods and microschools retain some of their pandemic enrollment gains, it could have ripple effects on funding that resonate throughout the K-12 landscape. Read the full essay .

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Free Education Essay Examples & Topics

Education is the process of gaining and exchanging knowledge and skills. It is associated with teaching, learning, discussing some subject, and researching. Generally, one party shares information, and the other absorbs it.

Underestimating the importance of education for people is nearly impossible. It broadens the horizons, creates opportunities, and provides stability. Education creates more areas for people to socialize and evolve.

Besides, an educated society creates a safer environment for living. It ensures constant economic and technological growth. An educated individual has all the chances to build a successful career and ensure financial prosperity for themselves.

You can be assigned to write an education essay in a school or college. Thus, you need to be prepared for such a task. That’s why our experts came up with some writing tips and topics for you. What’s more, you can read education essay examples composed by other students. They will be useful for both research and inspiration.

How to Write an Education Essay

Our tips for writing an essay about education are mainly based on the advice needed to create an academic essay. And yet, you should learn them or at least refresh your memory.

Look at these recommendations:

Pick one aspect to concentrate on

As can guess, the topic of education is too broad. You’ll have to narrow it down for your paper by focusing on one aspect. In this case, you will be able to cover the topic adequately and present strong arguments. For example, think of the ways to improve secondary education in your home country. Or write about the pros and cons of distance learning.

Conduct thorough research

Become an expert in the field or at least do quality research before writing. Your goal is to present a full picture in your essay. Thus, ensure you investigate different angles of your topic. Be careful here! Rely only on credible sources and provide only valid information.

Work on your thesis

A thesis statement is an essential part of your paper. It should clearly reflect your position regarding the chosen topic. This way, your thesis will guide your readers to follow your flow of ideas. It is supposed to appear as the last sentence of your introduction. If you struggle to formulate one, try our thesis statement generator .

Provide context in your introduction

Introduce the topic to your readers in the first paragraph. Start with a hook to catch their attention. Then, provide the general background of the chosen topic. Make sure that your readers have a clear vision of what’s to come.

Talk about your arguments in the body

The body of your paper should logically present your arguments. Dedicate a separate paragraph to each point you make. And don’t forget to come up with solid supportive details and appropriate examples. Typically, the body of an essay consists of three paragraphs.

Sum up and restate your thesis

In your conclusion, summarize everything that you have argued in the body paragraphs. Besides, you need to restate your thesis statement and prove to your readers that you have covered to topic properly. Never introduce any additional arguments in your conclusion.

Proofread and revise

Take a rest after finishing your essay – several days or at least 30 minutes. Then, come back to your work. Read it carefully, from the title to the very last word. There are plenty of different proofreading strategies. For example, you can read your essay out loud, backward, or even ask someone else to read and revise it for you.

Now you can check the examples of an essay about education below. They will demonstrate what is expected from you.

11 Education Essay Topics

So, writing an essay on education involves picking an appropriate idea and exploring it in-depth. Therefore, here we have listed topics that may be suitable for your work. For new original ideas, you can use our title generator .

But for now, you can check out these education essay topics:

• Mixed classes vs. single-sex classes. What approach is more effective for primary schools?
• How does education empower a person and provide a path to a successful life?
• Is higher education a wise investment or a waste of time and money?
• Practical ways to boost academic writing skills for college and university students.
• The impact of COVID-19 on education. How did the pandemic shift educational values? How will the new normal in education impact the literacy rates in the long run?
• The education system in the USA vs. in post-Soviet Union countries: a compare and contrast essay.
• What is the purpose of liberal education? How can it be applied in your career?
• Inclusive education: what obstacles may occur when children with disabilities learn in the same environment as the other kids.
• Does online education meet all the goals of education? Is there something that is left aside?
• The benefits of having English in the core curriculum of primary schools.
• How can we meet all the needs of disabled people while developing the curriculum of special education programs?

Thanks for reading! You can learn more about this subject by reading the essay examples about education. You can find them below.

6236 Best Essay Examples on Education

Online classes vs. traditional classes essay.

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• Education Essay

Essay on Education

Nelson Mandela rightly said, “Education is the most important weapon to change the world.” Education plays an important role in the development of an individual and making him a knowledgeable citizen. It is the education that makes an individual self-reliant, helps to suppress the social evils and contribute towards the development of the society and nation as a whole.

Education helps in unravelling the mystery of nature. It enables us to understand and improve the working of our society. It creates conditions for a better life. Education brings out the capabilities to fight injustice happening in society. Every individual has the right to education.

Introduction

Education is a significant tool that provides knowledge, skill, technique, information and enables people to know their rights and duties towards their family, society and the nation. You can expand your vision and outlook to see the world around us. It changes our perception of life. Education builds up the ability to explore new things to enhance your creativity. Your creativity is a tool to develop the nation.

Importance of Education

People still don't realise what role education and being educated plays in our lives and society. So, before making people aware of education and working for their access, it is very important to understand the need and importance of education. Education includes traditional learning methods that include theories and modern methods that include practical implementation of the subjects.

In schools, education is categorised into four stages, and each stage is important for each student:

Primary 

Secondary 

Senior secondary

Education can be classified into Various Forms:

Formal education: teaches us the academic part of any course or class, skills, or theory.

Non Formal education: We learn from our community, culture, nation-based programs, and the society that we live in

Informal education: We learn from our life lessons, experiences, other people, their experiences, nature, surroundings, etc.

Education empowers everyone. It is an important aspect that shapes the modern and industrialised world. People need education to be able to cope up with the advancements in this competitive world. Following are some areas where education is needed:

Removing Poverty: Education helps in eradicating poverty from our society.  An educated person can secure a good job and take care of all the basic needs and requirements of his family.

Safety and Security against Crime: A well-educated person cannot be easily duped or become a victim of any crime. They can develop the ability to stand against injustice. 

Increases Productivity: Educated people are more productive. With the help of knowledge and skills, they can explore new ideas. 

Confidence: A good education doesn’t mean to go to schools and colleges only. Education helps to become self-dependent and build great confidence within them so that they are able to accomplish difficult tasks.

Improved Standard of Life: On getting an education, quality of life gets improved. Education helps you to secure good jobs by which you can fulfil your dreams of buying a house or car or other luxury things. 

Women Empowerment: Education helps in empowering women. Women can voice out themselves in the society against the injustice done to them. They can be self-reliant and need not be dependent on anyone. Women empowerment will bring a lot of development in society as well as in the nation.

Upliftment of the Economically Weaker Section: Education is the most significant ingredient to change the world. Illiterate people suffer the hardships of discrimination, untouchability and injustice prevailing in the society. With the advancement of education, the weaker section can improve their quality of life. 

Communication: Communication is related to education. Good education helps to communicate better with others. It also improves our skills such as speech, body language, etc. 

Development of a nation: The countries that focus on educating their citizens and have a higher education level are considered more developed nations in every aspect of their lives.

  Individual growth: An educated individual always stands out in a crowd of uneducated people. They will be able to make better life decisions because with education comes knowledge. When an individual knows something, they will be able to understand things in a better manner.

 Independent: Education acts as a catalyst for a human being to be independent. If an individual is educated enough, they can manage their own life without being dependent on anybody.

  Success: Education helps in framing our mindset in a positive direction, and with this mindset, people can make their lives better. With education comes a degree, and with a degree comes a lot of opportunities. You just have to make a better choice for yourself, and everything will fall in place.

Talking particularly about India, education is a constitutional right of every citizen irrespective of caste, creed, race, religion, gender, etc. That’s the status given to education in India because educated people are always treated well and are well respected everywhere in the world.

Role of Education in Society

Education is the social institution through which the society provides its members with knowledge, facts, job skills and values. One of the most important roles of education is that it improves personal lives and helps society to run smoothly. As mentioned above, poverty can be eradicated and every individual can contribute towards the development of the country.

Education Creates a Better Society: An educated person is more likely to develop better moral and ethical values as compared to an uneducated person. Education brings equal opportunity for everyone and educated people will be able to create a better society. 

Education is the Backbone of Society: Education is an integral part of human society. Lack of education gives birth to numerous social problems like poor health, conflicts, and poor living standards. Education helps people overcome all problems by finding better solutions. 

Education Encourages Innovation and Creativity: Education leads to innovation. Innovation and creativity can only occur when skilled people know how to advance with different technologies. Educated people always can solve problems with the help of better techniques. 

Education Creates a Better Human Being: Education is the most powerful weapon by which the entire perspective of the world can be changed. Through education, a person can develop good moral values. It helps us to become a better person in life. 

Understanding the Responsibilities: As a social being, it becomes the responsibility of every individual to give something back to society and make it a better place for our next generation. An educated person is aware of his personal and social responsibilities.

Education helps in shaping the values of an individual. It helps individuals develop their moral values, humbleness, sympathy and empathy towards society, etc.

Students or any individual learn to express their viewpoints by reading, writing, learning. And these qualities or skills are taught with the help of education and nothing else.

Steps Taken to promote Education:

After discussing the importance of education, awareness is the next big step. People, especially those living in remote areas, should be aware and should have access to a better education system. The government has taken several steps for this purpose. It has started various initiatives to make education accessible to all and improve the quality of education for the betterment of every student. 

Some of the Prominent Steps:

The formation of the Right to Education Act, 2009 made education a fundamental right for every child belonging to 6-14 years.

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan

Adult education and national development scheme

Beti bachao, beti padhao

Midday meal scheme and many more.

Various other initiatives that the government has taken are Udaan, Saksham, Pragati, etc., to make education accessible to every part of the county.

Conclusion:

Education is the pathway for a nation’s progress. Education is the backbone of society. The government should take all measures to provide education to every individual of the country. This will bring equality among people and when people improvise their way of living, they become more responsible towards society.

The literacy rate of more developed nations is also high, and the literacy of every nation depends upon its education system. The government undoubtedly has made laws and formulated schemes, but implementing those schemes is a major task. 

The government, along with co-operation with the citizens, should make the society and nation a better place to live in. The growth of every nation depends upon the kind of population it has. A well-educated population will make a well-developed nation.

FAQs on Education Essay

1) Why is education important?

Education is important for the development of an individual. It is the most powerful weapon by which a person can contribute towards the development of the society and nation as a whole.

2) How is education a pathway to success?

Education provides job opportunities and also helps to expand your vision and change your outlook to see the world around us.

3) How can education help the economically backward people?

Uneducated or illiterate people do not have the ability to overcome hardships like discrimination, untouchability, and injustice. When these people get basic education, then they can become self-reliant and stand for their rights. With the advancement of education, they can improve their standard of living and poverty can be eradicated from the face of the Earth.

4) How are women empowered through education?

Education helps in empowering women. Women can voice out themselves in the society against the injustice done to them. They can be self-dependent. Women empowerment will bring a lot of development in society as well as in the nation.

5) What are the roles that education plays?

Education is vital in shaping the world and society. An educated society forms an educated nation. It is essential in creating a positive mindset and positive skills in an individual.

A Guide to Writing about Education

Introduction, types of papers, discipline-specific strategies.

Education is a field that bridges anthropology, sociology, psychology, science, and philosophy. When writing about education, you will utilize a myriad of writing styles and formats to address your essay topics.

As an education student, you may be asked to write:

• journals/field-notes: think of field-notes as the clay for your future thoughts, observations, and ideas; these are informal
• literature reviews: categorize or conceptualize relevant pieces of literature
• analysis papers: analyze outside sources to promote your own interpretation of a particular theory or style
• evaluative essays: look at a particular approach to teaching or theory of learning and discuss strengths and weaknesses
• narratives present collected data through use of informal methods, imaginary letters to parents, recommendations for school, etc.
• case studies: present problem, discuss others' thoughts on the issue, describe and analyze data/evidence, and draw conclusions
• research and lab papers: identify research questions, contextualize the question in the research literature; identify hypotheses, methods of data collection and reduction and analysis; discuss findings.

Here are some suggestions for approaching any education paper:

• Write about something that interests you Choose topics that will inspire you to delve deeper into research, synthesize new ideas, and spend time writing, revising, and editing. If you have trouble thinking of a topic, review your journal to see what ideas you have already come up with that might be applicable.
• Read If you're feeling confused about what is expected of you, try reading similar papers. Get together with other students and read each other's papers. Or, ask the professor to suggest some journal articles for you to look at for inspiration.
• Talk Talk about your paper, your ideas, and your problems. Talk with your professors, your classmates, and your friends. This will allow you to test out new ideas, find a topic you care about, talk through problems, and see where other people stand on your issue.
• Write a really bad paper It will give you a foundation to build a really great paper. Just be daring and try out radical ideas.
• Have ideas Make sure that each paper has an argument or an idea that you create. Outside support should be used to support the ideas you develop.
• Ground ideas in outside information Your ideas should be firmly based in outside literature, field-notes, research, etc. Every idea should have some fact or observation that supports it.
• Expect to revise Revise once, twice, as many times as needed. Be prepared to rip up a thesis or change your argument if necessary. Revision of grammar, content, and organization is key to an excellent paper. Good writing doesn't happen by magic.
• Take risks in ideas and in structure If your idea doesn't work out, try something else. Use complex and diverse sentences. Have fun while you're writing!

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What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

Education Essay Samples: Choose Yours to Get A+

What is an essay on education?

It’s a paper that students write in school or college to tell why education is important (1). The rules of structuring and formatting it are standard:

•  Hook readers and introduce a thesis. 
•  Provide arguments and evidence in the body to support your statement. 
•  Write a conclusion restating the thesis and summarizing the body. 

In this article, you’ll find three samples of education essays. All are of different lengths. Choose one that fits your assignment best, and feel free to use it as an example for writing your paper like a boss.

Importance of Education: Essay (250 words)

When asked to write an essay about the importance of education, check this sample for inspiration.

College Essay on Importance of Education (300 words)

A 300-word paper has a more complex structure. You can divide it into three paragraphs. Or, create a five-paragraph story with three parts in a body. It all depends on how you craft a thesis and how many arguments you have.

Bonus: How to Write a 300 Words Essay

500 Word Essay on Why Education Is Important

“Why is education important” essay can be long, too. If you get an assignment to write a 500+ word paper on this topic, here you have a sample to check.

What is education essay?

It is a short academic paper students write in school or college to explain the importance of education to the audience. It has a corresponding thesis statement and requires arguments and evidence to prove its relevance.

What is the purpose of education essay?

The purpose (2) is to explain the role of education and persuade readers of this idea with arguments and evidence.

 When writing, a student can use facts, statistics, and examples to support the arguments. Topics are numerous, but all relate to the idea that education is crucial for young generations and society in general.

How long is an essay on why education is important?

The length varies from 150 to 750 words. It depends on the assignment or how in-depth you intend to go on the topic and structure your academic paper.

Thus, a 150-word paper will be one paragraph, which is prevalent for middle school students. For 500-word essays, the structure is as follows: education essay introduction, body, and conclusion.

The longer your essay, the more structured and in-depth it will be.

Ready to Write Your Essay on Education?

I hope the examples from this article have helped you learn how to write an essay on importance of education. Whatever the length, please structure it accordingly: Follow the rules of academic writing. Use arguments and provide evidence.

An essay on education isn’t that challenging to write. Don’t be afraid to share your thoughts on the topic. Even a controversial idea works if you know how to spark readers with it.

References:

• https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/10-reasons-why-is-education-important/
• https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/purpose-education
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• A Research Guide
• Essay Topics

120 Education Essay Topics

Education essay topics: how to choose the perfect one, education argumentative essay topics:.

• The impact of standardized testing on students’ learning outcomes
• The effectiveness of online learning compared to traditional classroom education
• The role of technology in enhancing education
• The importance of teaching critical thinking skills in schools
• The benefits and drawbacks of homeschooling
• The impact of school uniforms on students’ academic performance and self-expression
• The necessity of teaching financial literacy in schools
• The influence of social media on students’ academic performance
• The pros and cons of single-sex education
• The significance of arts education in fostering creativity and innovation
• The role of physical education in promoting a healthy lifestyle among students
• The impact of inclusive education on students with disabilities
• The effectiveness of sex education programs in schools
• The importance of teaching cultural diversity in schools
• The role of standardized curriculum in preparing students for future careers

Education Persuasive Essay Topics:

• The importance of implementing comprehensive sex education in schools
• The benefits of incorporating technology in the classroom
• The advantages of year-round schooling
• The need for inclusive education for students with disabilities
• The benefits of arts education in fostering creativity and critical thinking
• The importance of teaching media literacy to combat fake news
• The necessity of implementing mandatory physical education classes
• The advantages of teaching coding and computer programming in schools
• The need for comprehensive mental health education in schools
• The benefits of implementing bilingual education programs
• The importance of teaching environmental education to promote sustainability
• The necessity of incorporating mindfulness and meditation practices in schools
• The advantages of teaching conflict resolution and empathy skills in schools
• The need for comprehensive and inclusive LGBTQ+ education in schools

Education Compare and Contrast Essay Topics:

• Traditional Education vs Online Education
• Public Schools vs Private Schools
• Homeschooling vs Traditional Schooling
• Standardized Testing vs Alternative Assessment Methods
• Single-Sex Education vs Co-education
• Vocational Education vs Academic Education
• Montessori Education vs Traditional Education
• In-person Learning vs Distance Learning
• Charter Schools vs Public Schools
• Early Childhood Education vs Primary Education
• Special Education Inclusion vs Special Education Separate Classes
• Education in Developed Countries vs Education in Developing Countries
• Education in Urban Areas vs Education in Rural Areas
• Education in Public Universities vs Education in Private Universities
• Education in the Past vs Education in the Present

Education Informative Essay Topics:

• The impact of technology on education: Advantages and disadvantages
• The importance of early childhood education in cognitive development
• The benefits of inclusive education for students with special needs
• The role of standardized testing in evaluating student performance
• The effects of homeschooling on children’s social and academic development
• The significance of financial literacy education in preparing students for the future
• The impact of teacher-student relationships on academic achievement
• The benefits of bilingual education in a globalized world
• The role of arts education in fostering creativity and critical thinking skills
• The challenges and benefits of online learning in higher education
• The importance of sex education in schools for promoting healthy relationships and preventing teenage pregnancy
• The impact of socioeconomic status on educational opportunities and outcomes
• The benefits of physical education in promoting overall health and well-being
• The role of character education in developing ethical and responsible citizens
• The effects of school bullying on students’ mental health and academic performance

Education Cause Effect Essay Topics:

• The impact of technology on student learning outcomes
• The effects of standardized testing on student motivation and performance
• The influence of parental involvement on student academic achievement
• The consequences of inadequate funding for schools on educational quality
• The relationship between teacher-student relationships and student engagement
• The effects of early childhood education on long-term academic success
• The impact of school bullying on student mental health and academic performance
• The consequences of high student-to-teacher ratios on classroom learning
• The relationship between socioeconomic status and educational attainment
• The effects of inclusive education on students with disabilities
• The influence of teacher quality on student achievement
• The consequences of school dropout rates on future employment opportunities
• The impact of school nutrition programs on student health and academic performance
• The effects of school violence on student well-being and educational outcomes
• The relationship between access to educational resources and educational inequality

Education Narrative Essay Topics:

• The transformative power of education: A personal journey
• Overcoming obstacles in pursuit of education: My story of resilience
• The role of teachers in shaping my educational experience
• Learning beyond the classroom: Lessons from real-life experiences
• The impact of technology on education: A personal perspective
• The importance of cultural diversity in education: A personal reflection
• The influence of family on my educational journey
• The challenges and rewards of homeschooling: A personal narrative
• The power of mentorship in shaping my educational goals
• The role of extracurricular activities in my overall education
• The impact of studying abroad on my personal growth and education
• The significance of inclusive education: A personal narrative
• The value of lifelong learning: My continuous educational journey
• The impact of standardized testing on my educational experience
• The role of education in shaping my career aspirations

Education Opinion Essay Topics:

• The benefits and drawbacks of online learning in the modern education system
• The role of technology in enhancing classroom instruction
• The effectiveness of homework in promoting student learning
• The benefits and challenges of inclusive education for students with disabilities
• The role of arts education in fostering creativity and innovation
• The influence of socioeconomic status on educational opportunities and outcomes
• The importance of teaching financial literacy in schools
• The impact of social media on students’ mental health and academic performance
• The benefits and drawbacks of single-sex education
• The role of standardized curriculum in promoting educational equity
• The effectiveness of early childhood education in preparing children for school
• The importance of teaching cultural diversity and inclusivity in schools

Education Evaluation Essay Topics:

• The effectiveness of online learning in comparison to traditional classroom education
• Evaluating the impact of standardized testing on student learning outcomes
• Assessing the effectiveness of inclusive education for students with special needs
• The role of technology in enhancing educational experiences
• Evaluating the effectiveness of teacher training programs in improving classroom instruction
• Assessing the impact of homework on student achievement
• The effectiveness of school vouchers in improving educational opportunities
• Evaluating the influence of parental involvement on student academic performance
• Assessing the effectiveness of early childhood education programs in preparing children for school
• The impact of class size on student engagement and learning outcomes
• Evaluating the effectiveness of bilingual education in promoting language acquisition
• Assessing the impact of school uniforms on student behavior and academic performance
• The effectiveness of character education programs in fostering positive values and ethics
• Evaluating the influence of socioeconomic status on educational attainment
• Assessing the effectiveness of alternative education models, such as Montessori or Waldorf, in meeting student needs

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• School Education /

Essay on Education: Samples in 100, 250 and 500 Words

• Updated on  
• Sep 13, 2023

Education is crucial to a person’s growth and to his ability to become a well-aware citizen. An individual becomes independent through education, which also aids in stifling social ills and advances society and the nation as a whole. Understanding the enigma of nature is made easier by education. It enables us to comprehend how our society functions and make it better. It makes things possible for a better life. Education develops the skills necessary to combat social injustice. Each person has a right to education.

If you are struggling to write an essay on education, then this blog will help you greatly to get ideas so that you can write an excellent essay. Keep on reading further to know more! 

This Blog Includes:

Essay on education – 100 words , essay on education – 250 words , essay on education – 500 words .

A country can only advance via education. Every citizen of the nation deserves access to education, therefore the government must take all necessary steps. By improving their way of life, people become more responsible to society which further leads to equality in society.

More developed countries have higher literacy rates, and each country’s literacy rate is influenced by its educational system. Legislation and plans have surely been developed by the government, but carrying them out will be difficult. It is the responsibility of the government to improve the quality of life in society and the country as a whole. 

Also Read: Importance of Education 

It would be an understatement to say that education is your key to success. It acts as the key to opening a number of doors leading to achievement. You can then improve your quality of life by doing so. Education is still seen as a luxury rather than a necessity in our nation. To make education accessible, educational awareness needs to be extended across the nation. People won’t consider anything to be necessary for a good existence until they understand the significance of it. 

Education is key to attaining freedom for humans as there are many opportunities available for an educated person. A person with a good education is not forced to do anything they don’t want to do and can select from a choice of options. Education most notably has a favourable effect on our perspective as well. It enables us to make the best decisions and consider issues from a variety of angles rather than just one.

In comparison to an ignorant person, you can increase your productivity and perform a task better with education. But one must always remember that success is not guaranteed by education alone. It’s a doorway to achievement that can only be opened with a lot of effort, commitment, and other qualities. Together, these factors will help you succeed in life.

In summary, education improves your character and teaches you a variety of abilities. Your intelligence and capacity for reasoned decision-making are improved. It helps a person grow more personally.

Must Read: Top Educational Quotes to Keep You Motivated

Education speeds up effective learning and instils values, information, skills, and beliefs. A person’s life becomes better and more serene as a result of education. The teaching of writing and reading is the first stage in education. People become conscious and literate through education. It makes it easier for people to find work and undoubtedly improves their standard of living. Additionally, it enhances and hones a person’s communication abilities. It teaches someone to make practical use of the resources at their disposal. The significance of education in advancing knowledge in society is one of its significant features. When a person is educated, knowledge is transferred from one generation to the next. Not one person, but many people are educated because of one. 

As one’s knowledge base grows and their technical proficiency improves, education strengthens a person intellectually, mentally, and socially. In the business and academic worlds, it aids in improving their position. It serves as a useful tool for all stages of life. In the cutting-edge technological environment, education is crucial. Unlike in the past, when only the wealthy could afford to send their children to school and receive training, education is not as difficult or expensive. In the twenty-first century, there are numerous strategies to raise educational standards. In today’s modernised period, the requirements for receiving an education have altered completely.

Nowadays, anyone, regardless of age, can pursue an education. If a person’s thinking is not constrained, their age will never be a barrier. The possibility of homeschooling has been made available in some curricula. Universities around the globe are starting a variety of distance learning programmes. Following high school, we can pursue both a job and further education through remote learning programmes. To make the courses available to everyone, the academic price has also been made affordable.

Governmental and non-governmental agencies organise a variety of events where teachers visit a community and impart knowledge to students. In order to assist someone become an educated person, parents and instructors play a crucial part in their lives. Through education people’s mindset is improved which leads to the removal of significant social barriers. It advances not just societal and economic progress but also personal advancements.

Any country’s greatest advantage is its educated population. Through them, a nation improves because education breaks down mindset barriers, imparts knowledge and information, and develops people’s listening skills and manners. It gives a person a distinctive standard of living and equips them to deal with issues at the local, state, federal, and worldwide levels. Education promotes self-reliance, mental stability, and financial security. It improves self-assurance and instils confidence in a person, which is one of the best qualities of success.

Also Read: Objectives of Educational Technology 

What is the aim of education?

The aim of education is to help an individual acquire knowledge and skills to realise their full potential and succeed in life. 

Who is the father of education?

Horace Mann is regarded as the father of education. 

What are the 3 types of education?

The three main types of education are formal, informal and non-formal. 

This was everything about the essay on education! Follow our essay topics for more information and keep following Leverage Edu . 

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• Essay on Importance of Education

Importance of Education Essay

Education is one of the key components for an individual’s success. It has the ability to shape one’s life in the right direction. Education is a process of imparting or acquiring knowledge, and developing the powers of reasoning and judgement. It prepares growing children intellectually for a life with more mature understanding and sensitivity to issues surrounding them. It improves not only the personal life of the people but also their community. Thus, one cannot neglect the significance of Education in life and society. Here, we have provided an essay on the Importance of Education. Students can use this essay to prepare for their English exam or as a speech to participate in the school competition.

Importance of Education

The importance of education in life is immense. It facilitates quality learning for people throughout their life. It inculcates knowledge, belief, skill, values and moral habits. It improves the way of living and raises the social and economic status of individuals. Education makes life better and more peaceful. It transforms the personality of individuals and makes them feel confident.

Well said by Nelson Mandela, “Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world”. To elaborate, it is the foundation of the society which brings economic wealth, social prosperity and political stability. It gives power to people to put their views and showcase their real potential. It strengthens democracy by providing citizens with the tools to participate in the governance process. It acts as an integrative force to foster social cohesion and national identity.

In India, education is a constitutional right of every citizen. So, people of any age group, religion, caste, creed and region are free to receive education. An educated person is respected everywhere and well-treated in society. As a kid, every child dreams of being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, actor, sportsperson, etc. These dreams can come true through education. So, investment in education gives the best return. Well-educated people have more opportunities to get a better job which makes them feel satisfied.

In schools, education is divided into different levels, i.e., preschool, primary, secondary and senior secondary. School education comprises traditional learning which provides students with theoretical knowledge. However, now various efforts are being made to establish inbuilt application-based learning by adding numerous experiments, practicals and extracurricular activities to the school curriculum. Students learn to read, write and represent their viewpoints in front of others. Also, in this era of digital Education, anyone can easily access information online at their fingertips. They can learn new skills and enhance their knowledge.

Steps Taken By Government To Promote Education

Education is evidently an important aspect that no government can ignore in order to ensure the equitable development of a nation. Unfortunately, some children still do not have access to education. The Government has thereby taken initiatives to improve education quality and made it accessible to everyone, especially the poor people.

The Government passed the Right to Education Act 2009 (RTE Act 2009) on 4 August 2009. This Act came into effect on 1 April 2010, following which education has become the fundamental right of every child in India. It provides free and compulsory elementary education to children of the age group of 6-14 years in a neighbourhood school within 1 km, up to Class 8 in India. On similar lines, there are other schemes launched by the government, such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan , Mid-Day Meal , Adult Education and Skill Development Scheme, National Means cum Merit Scholarship Scheme, National Program for Education of Girls at Elementary Education, Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya, Scheme for Infrastructure Development in Minority Institutions, Beti Bachao , Beti Padhao, etc.

For our country’s growth, we require a well-educated population equipped with the relevant knowledge, attitude and skills. This can be achieved by spreading awareness about the importance of Education in rural areas. There is a famous saying that “If we feed one person, we will eliminate his hunger for only one time. But, if we educate a person, we will change his entire life”. Henceforth he will become capable of earning a livelihood by himself.

This essay on the Importance of Education must have helped students to improve their writing section for the English exam. They can also practice essays on other topics by visiting the CBSE Essay page. Keep learning and stay tuned with BYJU’S for the latest updates on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams. Also, download the BYJU’S App for interactive study videos.

Frequently Asked Questions on Education Essay

How can the literacy rate in india be increased.

People in rural areas must be informed about the importance of providing education to their children. Also, with the COVID-19 situation, the government should take steps by providing laptops/phones for children to follow online classes.

Are girl children still denied their right to get educated?

Although awareness has now improved, there are still many villages in India where girl children are not provided with proper education or allowed to enrol themselves in schools. This mentality has to change for the betterment of the society.

Teaching subjects/academics alone is enough, or should students be introduced to other forms of educational activities too?

Extracurricular activities, moral value education, etc., are also as important as regular academic teachings.

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College Admissions , College Essays

The personal statement might just be the hardest part of your college application. Mostly this is because it has the least guidance and is the most open-ended. One way to understand what colleges are looking for when they ask you to write an essay is to check out the essays of students who already got in—college essays that actually worked. After all, they must be among the most successful of this weird literary genre.

In this article, I'll go through general guidelines for what makes great college essays great. I've also compiled an enormous list of 100+ actual sample college essays from 11 different schools. Finally, I'll break down two of these published college essay examples and explain why and how they work. With links to 177 full essays and essay excerpts , this article is a great resource for learning how to craft your own personal college admissions essay!

What Excellent College Essays Have in Common

Even though in many ways these sample college essays are very different from one other, they do share some traits you should try to emulate as you write your own essay.

Visible Signs of Planning

Building out from a narrow, concrete focus. You'll see a similar structure in many of the essays. The author starts with a very detailed story of an event or description of a person or place. After this sense-heavy imagery, the essay expands out to make a broader point about the author, and connects this very memorable experience to the author's present situation, state of mind, newfound understanding, or maturity level.

Knowing how to tell a story. Some of the experiences in these essays are one-of-a-kind. But most deal with the stuff of everyday life. What sets them apart is the way the author approaches the topic: analyzing it for drama and humor, for its moving qualities, for what it says about the author's world, and for how it connects to the author's emotional life.

Stellar Execution

A killer first sentence. You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again: you have to suck the reader in, and the best place to do that is the first sentence. Great first sentences are punchy. They are like cliffhangers, setting up an exciting scene or an unusual situation with an unclear conclusion, in order to make the reader want to know more. Don't take my word for it—check out these 22 first sentences from Stanford applicants and tell me you don't want to read the rest of those essays to find out what happens!

A lively, individual voice. Writing is for readers. In this case, your reader is an admissions officer who has read thousands of essays before yours and will read thousands after. Your goal? Don't bore your reader. Use interesting descriptions, stay away from clichés, include your own offbeat observations—anything that makes this essay sounds like you and not like anyone else.

Technical correctness. No spelling mistakes, no grammar weirdness, no syntax issues, no punctuation snafus—each of these sample college essays has been formatted and proofread perfectly. If this kind of exactness is not your strong suit, you're in luck! All colleges advise applicants to have their essays looked over several times by parents, teachers, mentors, and anyone else who can spot a comma splice. Your essay must be your own work, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting help polishing it.

And if you need more guidance, connect with PrepScholar's expert admissions consultants . These expert writers know exactly what college admissions committees look for in an admissions essay and chan help you craft an essay that boosts your chances of getting into your dream school.

Check out PrepScholar's Essay Editing and Coaching progra m for more details!

Links to Full College Essay Examples

Some colleges publish a selection of their favorite accepted college essays that worked, and I've put together a selection of over 100 of these.

Common App Essay Samples

Please note that some of these college essay examples may be responding to prompts that are no longer in use. The current Common App prompts are as follows:

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. 2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? 3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? 4. Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you? 5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. 6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Now, let's get to the good stuff: the list of 177 college essay examples responding to current and past Common App essay prompts. 

Connecticut college.

• 12 Common Application essays from the classes of 2022-2025

Hamilton College

• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2026
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2022
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2018
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2012
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2007

Johns Hopkins

These essays are answers to past prompts from either the Common Application or the Coalition Application (which Johns Hopkins used to accept).

• 1 Common Application or Coalition Application essay from the class of 2026
• 6 Common Application or Coalition Application essays from the class of 2025
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2024
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2023
• 7 Common Application of Universal Application essays from the class of 2022
• 5 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2021
• 7 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2020

Essay Examples Published by Other Websites

• 2 Common Application essays ( 1st essay , 2nd essay ) from applicants admitted to Columbia

Other Sample College Essays

Here is a collection of essays that are college-specific.

Babson College

• 4 essays (and 1 video response) on "Why Babson" from the class of 2020

Emory University

• 5 essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) from the class of 2020 along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on why the essays were exceptional
• 5 more recent essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on what made these essays stand out

University of Georgia

• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2019
• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2018
• 10 Harvard essays from 2023
• 10 Harvard essays from 2022
• 10 Harvard essays from 2021
• 10 Harvard essays from 2020
• 10 Harvard essays from 2019
• 10 Harvard essays from 2018
• 6 essays from admitted MIT students

Smith College

• 6 "best gift" essays from the class of 2018

Books of College Essays

If you're looking for even more sample college essays, consider purchasing a college essay book. The best of these include dozens of essays that worked and feedback from real admissions officers.

College Essays That Made a Difference —This detailed guide from Princeton Review includes not only successful essays, but also interviews with admissions officers and full student profiles.

50 Successful Harvard Application Essays by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson—A must for anyone aspiring to Harvard .

50 Successful Ivy League Application Essays and 50 Successful Stanford Application Essays by Gen and Kelly Tanabe—For essays from other top schools, check out this venerated series, which is regularly updated with new essays.

Heavenly Essays by Janine W. Robinson—This collection from the popular blogger behind Essay Hell includes a wider range of schools, as well as helpful tips on honing your own essay.

Analyzing Great Common App Essays That Worked

I've picked two essays from the examples collected above to examine in more depth so that you can see exactly what makes a successful college essay work. Full credit for these essays goes to the original authors and the schools that published them.

Example 1: "Breaking Into Cars," by Stephen, Johns Hopkins Class of '19 (Common App Essay, 636 words long)

I had never broken into a car before.

We were in Laredo, having just finished our first day at a Habitat for Humanity work site. The Hotchkiss volunteers had already left, off to enjoy some Texas BBQ, leaving me behind with the college kids to clean up. Not until we were stranded did we realize we were locked out of the van.

Someone picked a coat hanger out of the dumpster, handed it to me, and took a few steps back.

"Can you do that thing with a coat hanger to unlock it?"

"Why me?" I thought.

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame. Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally. My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed. "The water's on fire! Clear a hole!" he shouted, tossing me in the lake without warning. While I'm still unconvinced about that particular lesson's practicality, my Dad's overarching message is unequivocally true: much of life is unexpected, and you have to deal with the twists and turns.

Living in my family, days rarely unfolded as planned. A bit overlooked, a little pushed around, I learned to roll with reality, negotiate a quick deal, and give the improbable a try. I don't sweat the small stuff, and I definitely don't expect perfect fairness. So what if our dining room table only has six chairs for seven people? Someone learns the importance of punctuality every night.

But more than punctuality and a special affinity for musical chairs, my family life has taught me to thrive in situations over which I have no power. Growing up, I never controlled my older siblings, but I learned how to thwart their attempts to control me. I forged alliances, and realigned them as necessary. Sometimes, I was the poor, defenseless little brother; sometimes I was the omniscient elder. Different things to different people, as the situation demanded. I learned to adapt.

Back then, these techniques were merely reactions undertaken to ensure my survival. But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The question caught me off guard, much like the question posed to me in Laredo. Then, I realized I knew the answer. I knew why the coat hanger had been handed to me.

Growing up as the middle child in my family, I was a vital participant in a thing I did not govern, in the company of people I did not choose. It's family. It's society. And often, it's chaos. You participate by letting go of the small stuff, not expecting order and perfection, and facing the unexpected with confidence, optimism, and preparedness. My family experience taught me to face a serendipitous world with confidence.

What Makes This Essay Tick?

It's very helpful to take writing apart in order to see just how it accomplishes its objectives. Stephen's essay is very effective. Let's find out why!

An Opening Line That Draws You In

In just eight words, we get: scene-setting (he is standing next to a car about to break in), the idea of crossing a boundary (he is maybe about to do an illegal thing for the first time), and a cliffhanger (we are thinking: is he going to get caught? Is he headed for a life of crime? Is he about to be scared straight?).

Great, Detailed Opening Story

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame.

It's the details that really make this small experience come alive. Notice how whenever he can, Stephen uses a more specific, descriptive word in place of a more generic one. The volunteers aren't going to get food or dinner; they're going for "Texas BBQ." The coat hanger comes from "a dumpster." Stephen doesn't just move the coat hanger—he "jiggles" it.

Details also help us visualize the emotions of the people in the scene. The person who hands Stephen the coat hanger isn't just uncomfortable or nervous; he "takes a few steps back"—a description of movement that conveys feelings. Finally, the detail of actual speech makes the scene pop. Instead of writing that the other guy asked him to unlock the van, Stephen has the guy actually say his own words in a way that sounds like a teenager talking.

Turning a Specific Incident Into a Deeper Insight

Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

Stephen makes the locked car experience a meaningful illustration of how he has learned to be resourceful and ready for anything, and he also makes this turn from the specific to the broad through an elegant play on the two meanings of the word "click."

Using Concrete Examples When Making Abstract Claims

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally.

"Unpredictability and chaos" are very abstract, not easily visualized concepts. They could also mean any number of things—violence, abandonment, poverty, mental instability. By instantly following up with highly finite and unambiguous illustrations like "family of seven" and "siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing," Stephen grounds the abstraction in something that is easy to picture: a large, noisy family.

Using Small Bits of Humor and Casual Word Choice

My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed.

Obviously, knowing how to clean burning oil is not high on the list of things every 9-year-old needs to know. To emphasize this, Stephen uses sarcasm by bringing up a situation that is clearly over-the-top: "in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed."

The humor also feels relaxed. Part of this is because he introduces it with the colloquial phrase "you know," so it sounds like he is talking to us in person. This approach also diffuses the potential discomfort of the reader with his father's strictness—since he is making jokes about it, clearly he is OK. Notice, though, that this doesn't occur very much in the essay. This helps keep the tone meaningful and serious rather than flippant.

An Ending That Stretches the Insight Into the Future

But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The ending of the essay reveals that Stephen's life has been one long preparation for the future. He has emerged from chaos and his dad's approach to parenting as a person who can thrive in a world that he can't control.

This connection of past experience to current maturity and self-knowledge is a key element in all successful personal essays. Colleges are very much looking for mature, self-aware applicants. These are the qualities of successful college students, who will be able to navigate the independence college classes require and the responsibility and quasi-adulthood of college life.

What Could This Essay Do Even Better?

Even the best essays aren't perfect, and even the world's greatest writers will tell you that writing is never "finished"—just "due." So what would we tweak in this essay if we could?

Replace some of the clichéd language. Stephen uses handy phrases like "twists and turns" and "don't sweat the small stuff" as a kind of shorthand for explaining his relationship to chaos and unpredictability. But using too many of these ready-made expressions runs the risk of clouding out your own voice and replacing it with something expected and boring.

Use another example from recent life. Stephen's first example (breaking into the van in Laredo) is a great illustration of being resourceful in an unexpected situation. But his essay also emphasizes that he "learned to adapt" by being "different things to different people." It would be great to see how this plays out outside his family, either in the situation in Laredo or another context.

Example 2: By Renner Kwittken, Tufts Class of '23 (Common App Essay, 645 words long)

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver. I saw it in my favorite book, Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," and for some reason, I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of driving a giant pickle. Much to the discontent of my younger sister, I insisted that my parents read us that book as many nights as possible so we could find goldbug, a small little golden bug, on every page. I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Then I discovered a real goldbug: gold nanoparticles that can reprogram macrophages to assist in killing tumors, produce clear images of them without sacrificing the subject, and heat them to obliteration.

Suddenly the destination of my pickle was clear.

I quickly became enveloped by the world of nanomedicine; I scoured articles about liposomes, polymeric micelles, dendrimers, targeting ligands, and self-assembling nanoparticles, all conquering cancer in some exotic way. Completely absorbed, I set out to find a mentor to dive even deeper into these topics. After several rejections, I was immensely grateful to receive an invitation to work alongside Dr. Sangeeta Ray at Johns Hopkins.

In the lab, Dr. Ray encouraged a great amount of autonomy to design and implement my own procedures. I chose to attack a problem that affects the entire field of nanomedicine: nanoparticles consistently fail to translate from animal studies into clinical trials. Jumping off recent literature, I set out to see if a pre-dose of a common chemotherapeutic could enhance nanoparticle delivery in aggressive prostate cancer, creating three novel constructs based on three different linear polymers, each using fluorescent dye (although no gold, sorry goldbug!). Though using radioactive isotopes like Gallium and Yttrium would have been incredible, as a 17-year-old, I unfortunately wasn't allowed in the same room as these radioactive materials (even though I took a Geiger counter to a pair of shoes and found them to be slightly dangerous).

I hadn't expected my hypothesis to work, as the research project would have ideally been led across two full years. Yet while there are still many optimizations and revisions to be done, I was thrilled to find -- with completely new nanoparticles that may one day mean future trials will use particles with the initials "RK-1" -- thatcyclophosphamide did indeed increase nanoparticle delivery to the tumor in a statistically significant way.

A secondary, unexpected research project was living alone in Baltimore, a new city to me, surrounded by people much older than I. Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research. Whether in a presentation or in a casual conversation, making others interested in science is perhaps more exciting to me than the research itself. This solidified a new pursuit to angle my love for writing towards illuminating science in ways people can understand, adding value to a society that can certainly benefit from more scientific literacy.

It seems fitting that my goals are still transforming: in Scarry's book, there is not just one goldbug, there is one on every page. With each new experience, I'm learning that it isn't the goldbug itself, but rather the act of searching for the goldbugs that will encourage, shape, and refine my ever-evolving passions. Regardless of the goldbug I seek -- I know my pickle truck has just begun its journey.

Renner takes a somewhat different approach than Stephen, but their essay is just as detailed and engaging. Let's go through some of the strengths of this essay.

One Clear Governing Metaphor

This essay is ultimately about two things: Renner’s dreams and future career goals, and Renner’s philosophy on goal-setting and achieving one’s dreams.

But instead of listing off all the amazing things they’ve done to pursue their dream of working in nanomedicine, Renner tells a powerful, unique story instead. To set up the narrative, Renner opens the essay by connecting their experiences with goal-setting and dream-chasing all the way back to a memorable childhood experience:

This lighthearted–but relevant!--story about the moment when Renner first developed a passion for a specific career (“finding the goldbug”) provides an anchor point for the rest of the essay. As Renner pivots to describing their current dreams and goals–working in nanomedicine–the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” is reflected in Renner’s experiments, rejections, and new discoveries.

Though Renner tells multiple stories about their quest to “find the goldbug,” or, in other words, pursue their passion, each story is connected by a unifying theme; namely, that as we search and grow over time, our goals will transform…and that’s okay! By the end of the essay, Renner uses the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” to reiterate the relevance of the opening story:

While the earlier parts of the essay convey Renner’s core message by showing, the final, concluding paragraph sums up Renner’s insights by telling. By briefly and clearly stating the relevance of the goldbug metaphor to their own philosophy on goals and dreams, Renner demonstrates their creativity, insight, and eagerness to grow and evolve as the journey continues into college.

An Engaging, Individual Voice

This essay uses many techniques that make Renner sound genuine and make the reader feel like we already know them.

Technique #1: humor. Notice Renner's gentle and relaxed humor that lightly mocks their younger self's grand ambitions (this is different from the more sarcastic kind of humor used by Stephen in the first essay—you could never mistake one writer for the other).

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver.

I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Renner gives a great example of how to use humor to your advantage in college essays. You don’t want to come off as too self-deprecating or sarcastic, but telling a lightheartedly humorous story about your younger self that also showcases how you’ve grown and changed over time can set the right tone for your entire essay.

Technique #2: intentional, eye-catching structure. The second technique is the way Renner uses a unique structure to bolster the tone and themes of their essay . The structure of your essay can have a major impact on how your ideas come across…so it’s important to give it just as much thought as the content of your essay!

For instance, Renner does a great job of using one-line paragraphs to create dramatic emphasis and to make clear transitions from one phase of the story to the next:

Suddenly the destination of my pickle car was clear.

Not only does the one-liner above signal that Renner is moving into a new phase of the narrative (their nanoparticle research experiences), it also tells the reader that this is a big moment in Renner’s story. It’s clear that Renner made a major discovery that changed the course of their goal pursuit and dream-chasing. Through structure, Renner conveys excitement and entices the reader to keep pushing forward to the next part of the story.

Technique #3: playing with syntax. The third technique is to use sentences of varying length, syntax, and structure. Most of the essay's written in standard English and uses grammatically correct sentences. However, at key moments, Renner emphasizes that the reader needs to sit up and pay attention by switching to short, colloquial, differently punctuated, and sometimes fragmented sentences.

Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research.

In the examples above, Renner switches adeptly between long, flowing sentences and quippy, telegraphic ones. At the same time, Renner uses these different sentence lengths intentionally. As they describe their experiences in new places, they use longer sentences to immerse the reader in the sights, smells, and sounds of those experiences. And when it’s time to get a big, key idea across, Renner switches to a short, punchy sentence to stop the reader in their tracks.

The varying syntax and sentence lengths pull the reader into the narrative and set up crucial “aha” moments when it’s most important…which is a surefire way to make any college essay stand out.

Renner's essay is very strong, but there are still a few little things that could be improved.

Connecting the research experiences to the theme of “finding the goldbug.”  The essay begins and ends with Renner’s connection to the idea of “finding the goldbug.” And while this metaphor is deftly tied into the essay’s intro and conclusion, it isn’t entirely clear what Renner’s big findings were during the research experiences that are described in the middle of the essay. It would be great to add a sentence or two stating what Renner’s big takeaways (or “goldbugs”) were from these experiences, which add more cohesion to the essay as a whole.

Give more details about discovering the world of nanomedicine. It makes sense that Renner wants to get into the details of their big research experiences as quickly as possible. After all, these are the details that show Renner’s dedication to nanomedicine! But a smoother transition from the opening pickle car/goldbug story to Renner’s “real goldbug” of nanoparticles would help the reader understand why nanoparticles became Renner’s goldbug. Finding out why Renner is so motivated to study nanomedicine–and perhaps what put them on to this field of study–would help readers fully understand why Renner chose this path in the first place.

4 Essential Tips for Writing Your Own Essay

How can you use this discussion to better your own college essay? Here are some suggestions for ways to use this resource effectively.

#1: Get Help From the Experts

Getting your college applications together takes a lot of work and can be pretty intimidatin g. Essays are even more important than ever now that admissions processes are changing and schools are going test-optional and removing diversity standards thanks to new Supreme Court rulings .  If you want certified expert help that really makes a difference, get started with  PrepScholar’s Essay Editing and Coaching program. Our program can help you put together an incredible essay from idea to completion so that your application stands out from the crowd. We've helped students get into the best colleges in the United States, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.  If you're ready to take the next step and boost your odds of getting into your dream school, connect with our experts today .

#2: Read Other Essays to Get Ideas for Your Own

As you go through the essays we've compiled for you above, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you explain to yourself (or someone else!) why the opening sentence works well?
• Look for the essay's detailed personal anecdote. What senses is the author describing? Can you easily picture the scene in your mind's eye?
• Find the place where this anecdote bridges into a larger insight about the author. How does the essay connect the two? How does the anecdote work as an example of the author's characteristic, trait, or skill?
• Check out the essay's tone. If it's funny, can you find the places where the humor comes from? If it's sad and moving, can you find the imagery and description of feelings that make you moved? If it's serious, can you see how word choice adds to this tone?

Make a note whenever you find an essay or part of an essay that you think was particularly well-written, and think about what you like about it . Is it funny? Does it help you really get to know the writer? Does it show what makes the writer unique? Once you have your list, keep it next to you while writing your essay to remind yourself to try and use those same techniques in your own essay.

#3: Find Your "A-Ha!" Moment

All of these essays rely on connecting with the reader through a heartfelt, highly descriptive scene from the author's life. It can either be very dramatic (did you survive a plane crash?) or it can be completely mundane (did you finally beat your dad at Scrabble?). Either way, it should be personal and revealing about you, your personality, and the way you are now that you are entering the adult world.

Check out essays by authors like John Jeremiah Sullivan , Leslie Jamison , Hanif Abdurraqib , and Esmé Weijun Wang to get more examples of how to craft a compelling personal narrative.

#4: Start Early, Revise Often

Let me level with you: the best writing isn't writing at all. It's rewriting. And in order to have time to rewrite, you have to start way before the application deadline. My advice is to write your first draft at least two months before your applications are due.

Let it sit for a few days untouched. Then come back to it with fresh eyes and think critically about what you've written. What's extra? What's missing? What is in the wrong place? What doesn't make sense? Don't be afraid to take it apart and rearrange sections. Do this several times over, and your essay will be much better for it!

For more editing tips, check out a style guide like Dreyer's English or Eats, Shoots & Leaves .

What's Next?

Still not sure which colleges you want to apply to? Our experts will show you how to make a college list that will help you choose a college that's right for you.

Interested in learning more about college essays? Check out our detailed breakdown of exactly how personal statements work in an application , some suggestions on what to avoid when writing your essay , and our guide to writing about your extracurricular activities .

Working on the rest of your application? Read what admissions officers wish applicants knew before applying .

The recommendations in this post are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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What Is Education For?

Six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them, by david orr.

One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27) Originally published in Winter 1991 on page 52 Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute

We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.

David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International’s excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth , Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."

The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.

SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS

What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says "All my means are sane, my motive and object mad." In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.

Historically, Francis Bacon’s proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes’ epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem . Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask "what does this substance do to what?" until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth .. "Managing the planet" has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.

What might be managed is us : human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.

A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness . There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.

It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we’re losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:

"[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities…. In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."

In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and "In itself it will never make us ethical [people]." Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.

A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled . In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success . Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement : we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review :

"Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul."

WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR

Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.

First, all education is environmental education . By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.

A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia . The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person . Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student’s mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.

Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world . The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.

Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities . I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.

My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words . Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.

Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses . Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.

AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS

If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry’s words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?

My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.

Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?

Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:

Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold’s words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?"

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Essay on Importance of Education for Students

500 words essay on importance of education.

To say Education is important is an understatement. Education is a weapon to improve one’s life. It is probably the most important tool to change one’s life. Education for a child begins at home. It is a lifelong process that ends with death. Education certainly determines the quality of an individual’s life. Education improves one’s knowledge, skills and develops the personality and attitude. Most noteworthy, Education affects the chances of employment for people. A highly educated individual is probably very likely to get a good job. In this essay on importance of education, we will tell you about the value of education in life and society.

Importance of Education in Life

First of all, Education teaches the ability to read and write. Reading and writing is the first step in Education. Most information is done by writing. Hence, the lack of writing skill means missing out on a lot of information. Consequently, Education makes people literate.

Above all, Education is extremely important for employment. It certainly is a great opportunity to make a decent living. This is due to the skills of a high paying job that Education provides. Uneducated people are probably at a huge disadvantage when it comes to jobs. It seems like many poor people improve their lives with the help of Education.

Better Communication is yet another role in Education. Education improves and refines the speech of a person. Furthermore, individuals also improve other means of communication with Education.

Education makes an individual a better user of technology. Education certainly provides the technical skills necessary for using technology . Hence, without Education, it would probably be difficult to handle modern machines.

People become more mature with the help of Education. Sophistication enters the life of educated people. Above all, Education teaches the value of discipline to individuals. Educated people also realize the value of time much more. To educated people, time is equal to money.

Finally, Educations enables individuals to express their views efficiently. Educated individuals can explain their opinions in a clear manner. Hence, educated people are quite likely to convince people to their point of view.

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Importance of Education in Society

First of all, Education helps in spreading knowledge in society. This is perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Education. There is a quick propagation of knowledge in an educated society. Furthermore, there is a transfer of knowledge from generation to another by Education.

Education helps in the development and innovation of technology. Most noteworthy, the more the education, the more technology will spread. Important developments in war equipment, medicine , computers, take place due to Education.

Education is a ray of light in the darkness. It certainly is a hope for a good life. Education is a basic right of every Human on this Planet. To deny this right is evil. Uneducated youth is the worst thing for Humanity. Above all, the governments of all countries must ensure to spread Education.

FAQs on Essay on Importance of Education

Q.1 How Education helps in Employment?

A.1 Education helps in Employment by providing necessary skills. These skills are important for doing a high paying job.

Q.2 Mention one way in Education helps a society?

A.2 Education helps society by spreading knowledge. This certainly is one excellent contribution to Education.

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Essay on Education

Here we have shared the Essay on Education in detail so you can use it in your exam or assignment of 150, 250, 400, 500, or 1000 words.

You can use this Essay on Education in any assignment or project whether you are in school (class 10th or 12th), college, or preparing for answer writing in competitive exams. 

Topics covered in this article.

Essay on Education in 150 words

Essay on education in 250-300 words, essay on education in 500-1000 words.

Education is the key to personal growth, social development, and societal progress. It encompasses formal education provided through schools and institutions, as well as informal and lifelong learning. Education equips individuals with the essential knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to navigate the complexities of life and contribute meaningfully to society.

Education empowers individuals, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and innovation. It promotes social mobility, reduces poverty, and fosters social cohesion. Through education, individuals develop the ability to make informed decisions, overcome challenges, and fulfill their potential.

Furthermore, education is a catalyst for positive change. It encourages individuals to question the status quo, explore new ideas, and contribute to the betterment of society. By investing in education, we invest in the future, equipping individuals with the necessary skills to address global challenges, drive innovation, and build a more inclusive and sustainable world.

Education is a fundamental right that should be accessible to all, regardless of gender, socioeconomic background, or geographical location. It is through education that we can create a more equitable, prosperous, and harmonious society.

Education is the cornerstone of personal and societal development. It equips individuals with the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to navigate the complexities of life and contribute meaningfully to society. In its broadest sense, education encompasses formal schooling, informal learning, and lifelong learning.

Formal education, provided through schools and institutions, lays the foundation for intellectual, social, and emotional growth. It imparts essential knowledge, promotes critical thinking, and develops skills that are essential for success in various fields.

However, education goes beyond the classroom. Informal learning occurs through everyday experiences, interactions, and self-directed exploration. It allows individuals to acquire practical skills, adaptability, and a broader understanding of the world.

Lifelong learning is a continuous process that extends beyond formal education. It involves the pursuit of knowledge and personal growth throughout one’s life, enabling individuals to adapt to changing circumstances, embrace new opportunities, and contribute to a dynamic society.

Education empowers individuals, enabling them to overcome challenges, make informed decisions, and fulfill their potential. It plays a vital role in promoting social mobility, reducing poverty, and fostering social cohesion.

Moreover, education fosters critical thinking, creativity, and innovation, which are essential for progress and development. It encourages individuals to question the status quo, explore new ideas, and contribute to positive change.

In conclusion, education is an indispensable tool for personal growth and societal progress. It encompasses formal, informal, and lifelong learning, providing individuals with the knowledge, skills, and mindset necessary to navigate the complexities of life. By investing in education, we invest in the future, empowering individuals and communities to create a better world.

Title: Education – Empowering Minds, Shaping Futures

Introduction :

Education is a powerful tool that empowers individuals, shapes futures, and drives societal progress. It encompasses the acquisition of knowledge, development of skills, and cultivation of values that prepare individuals for personal and professional success. This essay delves into the importance of education, its key elements, and its transformative impact on individuals and societies.

The Power of Education

Education is a transformative force that empowers individuals to reach their full potential. It equips them with the necessary knowledge and skills to navigate life’s challenges, make informed decisions, and contribute meaningfully to society. Education cultivates critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving abilities, nurturing well-rounded individuals capable of adapting to a rapidly changing world.

Formal Education

Formal education, provided through schools, colleges, and universities, forms the foundation of a person’s educational journey. It involves structured learning environments, standardized curricula, and certified qualifications. Formal education imparts core subjects such as mathematics, science, languages, and humanities, along with important life skills such as communication, collaboration, and critical analysis.

Informal and Lifelong Learning

Education goes beyond formal settings. Informal learning occurs through daily experiences, interactions, and observations. It includes practical skills acquired through apprenticeships, mentorships, and on-the-job training. Lifelong learning, on the other hand, is a continuous process that extends beyond formal education. It involves self-directed learning, personal development, and the pursuit of knowledge throughout one’s life.

The Role of Education in Society

Education plays a crucial role in social development and progress. It promotes social mobility, empowering individuals to transcend socioeconomic barriers and improve their quality of life. Education fosters social cohesion by nurturing understanding, empathy, and tolerance among diverse groups of individuals. It also contributes to economic growth by producing a skilled workforce, fostering innovation, and driving entrepreneurship.

Education for Personal Development

Education is not merely the acquisition of knowledge; it is also a journey of personal growth and self-discovery. It helps individuals develop their unique talents, interests, and passions. Education cultivates values such as integrity, responsibility, and empathy, shaping individuals into ethical and compassionate members of society. Furthermore, it nurtures self-confidence, self-awareness, and resilience, equipping individuals with the tools to overcome challenges and thrive in a competitive world.

Challenges and Opportunities in Education

Despite the transformative power of education, there are numerous challenges that need to be addressed. Access to quality education remains unequal, particularly for marginalized communities and disadvantaged regions. Gender disparities in education persist, limiting opportunities for girls and women. Furthermore, the rapid advancement of technology necessitates adapting educational systems to prepare individuals for the demands of the digital age.

However, there are also exciting opportunities in education. Technology has the potential to revolutionize learning, making education accessible, interactive, and personalized. Blended learning models, online platforms, and open educational resources offer new avenues for education. Emphasizing holistic education, including social and emotional development, promotes well-rounded individuals capable of addressing complex global challenges.

Conclusion :

Education is a transformative force that empowers individuals, shapes futures, and drives societal progress. It goes beyond formal schooling, encompassing informal and lifelong learning. Education fosters critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving abilities, equipping individuals with the skills to navigate an ever-changing world. It promotes social mobility, social cohesion, and economic growth. Moreover, education is a journey of personal development, nurturing values, skills, and self-awareness. While challenges such as unequal access and gender disparities persist, advancements in technology offer exciting opportunities for innovation and inclusive learning. By investing in education and ensuring equal opportunities for all, societies can unlock the full potential of individuals, leading to a more prosperous, equitable, and sustainable future.

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The Winners of Our ‘How To’ Contest

Over 2,200 teenagers submitted essays on how to do everything from fix a toilet to fight a kangaroo. We’ll be publishing the work of the winners all week.

By The Learning Network

Almost from the time our new “ How To” Informational Writing Contest for Teenagers went live in January, we knew it would be a success.

First there was the creative range of topics. As submissions rolled in — 2,223 by the deadline — we were happy to see students take on a variety of key emotional, intellectual and physical skills, including how to win an argument, fix a toilet, cope with anxiety, remember names and trip gracefully.

But we were even more delighted to be introduced to a few offbeat skills we hadn’t previously realized were crucial, like how to do the worm, snowball-attack your sister, fight a kangaroo and “talk to your crush without sounding like a talking potato.”

Our participants had fun. We know that because in their accompanying process statements they told us so. They liked coming up with topic ideas, and writing something for school in a format they’d never seen before. They even enjoyed finding and interviewing experts — a contest requirement that had seemed daunting at first to many, but turned out to be one of the most rewarding steps.

We hope you’ll enjoy the results as much as we have. We’ll be publishing the work of the top 11 winners all week, and we’ll add links here when we do.

In alphabetical order by the writer’s first name

“ How to Befriend an Introvert ” : Ashley Zhang, 14, Collingwood School, West Vancouver, British Columbia

“ How to Do the Worm ” : Camille Gonzales, 18, Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Houston

“ How to Find Your Balance ” : Chelsea Hu, 18, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.

“How to Make Bubble Tea” : Hanyi Zhou, 14, Chinese International School, Hong Kong

“How to Make the Perfect Sandwich” : Jackson DeNichilo, 15, Fallston High School, Fallston, Md.

“How to Wrap a Dumpling” : Jacob Wang, 16, Charterhouse School, Godalming, England

“How to Conduct a Podcast Interview” : Matthew Jeong, 17, Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Houston

“How to Be a Kid Forever” : Raniya Chowdhury, 17, John Fraser Secondary School, Mississauga, Ontario

“How to Become Friends With a Wild Bird” : Shannon Hong, 16, Herricks High School, New Hyde Park, N.Y.

“How to Host Unexpected Guests” : Sofia Fontenot, 18, Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Houston

“How to Make Fear Your Friend” : Zoe Brown, 14, Summit High School, Bend, Ore.

“How to Recover After Yet Another Disappointing Season by Your Favorite N.F.L. Team” : Alden Comes, 13, Briarcliff Middle School, Mountain Lakes, N.J.

“How to Tell the Ugly Truth” : Alex (Hayoung) Jung, 16, Seoul Foreign School, Seoul

“How to Remember Names” : Anahita Driver, 13, Gregory Middle School, Naperville, Ill.

“How to Find Gratitude in Everyday Life” : Andrew Coraggio, 16, Arrowhead Union High School, Hartland, Wis.

“How to Antique Shop” : Callisto Lim, 17, Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Houston

“How to Build an Optimal Environment for Your Fish” : Chasity Rolon, 16, Deer Park High School, New York, N.Y.

“How to Snowball Attack Your Sister” : Harper Mooney, 14, Marblehead High School, Marblehead, Mass.

“How to Achieve Inner Peace by Washing Your Dishes” : Jackson Cooke, 18, Briarwood Christian High School, Birmingham, Ala.

“How to Spot Counterfeit Currency” : Kaylie Milton, 17, West High School, Iowa City, Iowa

“How to Pee On a Hike” : Lauren Acker, 17, Lakeside High School, DeKalb County, Ga.

“How to Mimic an Accent” : Michael Noh, 14, Korea International School Pangyo Campus, Seongnam, South Korea

“How to Speak Like a British Person” : Owen Wilde, 16, Maynard High School, Maynard, Mass.

“How to Ask a Teacher for Help” : Sarah Harris, 15, Boothbay Region High School, Boothbay Harbor, Maine

“How to Spin Pens” : Siddharth S., 16, Peepal Prodigy School Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

“How to Make Kids Excited About History” : Vivian Wenan Chang, 17, BASIS Chandler, Chandler, Ariz.

“How to Ride a Roller Coaster Without Fear” : Wang Ziyun, 16, Raffles Girls’ School, Singapore

“How to Make a Three-Point Shot” : Will Peña, 17, Academy at the Lakes, Land O’ Lakes, Fla.

“How to Play Darts” : Xizhe Yang, 15, Shanghai High School International Division, Shanghai

Honorable Mentions

“How to Survive Middle School Hallways” : Alice Liang, 13, Islander Middle School, Mercer Island, Wash.

“How to Learn a New Language” : Andrew Chen, 14, International School of Beijing, Beijing

“How to Let Go of Someone” : Ariel Ting, 16, Taipei American School, Taipei, Taiwan

“How to Cope With Your Anxiety” : Ava Cho, 18, Daegu International School, Daegu, South Korea

“How to Live Openly As a Lesbian” : Ayco Phlypo, 17, Atheneum Gentbrugge, Ghent, Belgium

“How to Make Homemade Pasta” : Bella DiBernardo, 16, Alta Vista Middle College, Santa Barbara, Calif.

“How to Prepare for Running a Marathon” : Brett Barker, 17, Arrowhead Union High School, Hartland, Wis.

“Keep the Sandman at Bay” : Bryant, 18, Bandung Independent School, Bandung, Indonesia

“How to Fix a Toilet!” : Carla Lopez, 16, Jose Marti STEM Academy, Union City, N.J.

“How to Order at a Specialty Coffee Shop” : Cassandra Garcia, 16, home school, Portland, Texas

“How to Trip Gracefully” : Eileen Kim, 15, Urbana High School, Ijamsville, Md.

“How to Drive Your Siblings Mad” : Elaine Kim, 15, West Ranch High School, Stevenson Ranch, Calif.

“Being Objective” : James Yi, 17, Orange County School of the Arts, Santa Ana, Calif.

“How to Accept Failure” : Jamie Park, 16, Yongsan International School of Seoul, Seoul

“How to Cope With a Panic Attack” : Jason Kim, 15, Georgetown Preparatory School, North Bethesda, Md.

“How to Escape a Night Market” : Joyce Chang, 16, Stella Matutina Girls’ High School, Taichung City, Taiwan

“How to Overcome Assault: A Survivor’s Guide on Trauma-Related Shame” : Juliana Segal, 17, The Montessori School of Raleigh Upper School, Raleigh, N.C.

“How to Play Out of Tune On the Flute” : Kavya Muralidhar, 13, Islander Middle School, Mercer Island, Wash.

“How to Write a Poem” : Lareina Yuan, 14, YK Pao School, Shanghai

“How to Make Tanghulu” : Lehan Gu, 15, Northwood High School, Irvine, Calif.

“How to Be When Meeting New People” : MaryEden Rall, 13, Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School, Montgomery, Ala.

“How to Make the Perfect Playlist” : Rachel Wieland, 17, Arrowhead Union High School, Hartland, Wis.

“How to Talk to Your Crush Without Sounding Like a Talking Potato” : Roxanne Wu, 16, International School of Beijing, Beijing

“How to Help a Child With Autism” : Sarah Zeng, 15, Victoria Park Collegiate Institute, Toronto

“How to Deal With Nerves” : Sasha Luhur, 14, Northwood School, Lake Placid, N.Y.

“How to Watch Clouds” : Shio Kim, 14, North London Collegiate School Jeju, Seogwipo, South Korea

“How to Discuss Controversial Issues With Parents” : Siyao Feng, 18, Linden Hall School for Girls, Lititz, Pa.

“How to Write a Song” : Sophia Kim, 15, Chadwick International School, Incheon, South Korea

“How to Write a Song” : Stephanie Ma, 16, The Webb Schools, Claremont, Calif.

“How to Be a Good Dukjil-er” : Suevean (Evelyn) Chin, Asia Pacific International School, Seoul

“How to Win an Argument” : Suri Boryang Kim, PTGMS, South Korea

“How to Tie a Shoe” : Vivian Olivera, 17, Academy at the Lakes, Land O’ Lakes, Fla.

“Grilling Pork Belly For the Best Flavor” : Yoonseo Cho, 17, Portola High School, Irvine, Calif.

Thank you to our contest judges.

Ana Paola Wong, Annissa Hambouz, Caroline Gilpin, Dana Davis, Elisa Zonana, Isaac Aronow, Jeremy Engle, Jeremy Hyler, John Otis, Juliette Seive, Katherine Schulten, Kathryn Curto, Ken Paul, Kimberly Wiedmeyer, Kirsten Akens, Michael Gonchar, Natalie Proulx, Phoebe Lett, Shannon Doyne, Sharon Murchie, Shira Katz, Sue Mermelstein, Susan Josephs, Sydney Stein

Is a robot writing your kids’ essays? We asked educators to weigh in on the growing role of AI in classrooms.

R emember writing essays in high school? Chances are you had to look up stuff in an encyclopedia — an actual one, not Wikipedia — or else connect to AOL via a modem bigger than your parents’ Taurus station wagon.

Now, of course, there’s artificial intelligence. According to new research from Pew, about 1 in 5 US teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork. Kids in upper grades are more apt to have used the chatbot: About a quarter of 11th- and 12th-graders who know about ChatGPT have tried it.

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, and educators continue to grapple with the ethics surrounding its growing popularity. Essentially, it generates free, human-like responses based on commands. (I’m sure this sentence will look antiquated in about six months, like when people described the internet as the “information superhighway.”)

I used ChatGPT to plug in this prompt: “Write an essay on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” Within moments, ChatGPT created an essay as thorough as anything I’d labored over in AP English.

Is this cheating? Is it just part of our strange new world? I talked to several educators about what they’re seeing in classrooms and how they’re monitoring it. Before you berate your child over how you wrote essays with a No. 2 pencil, here are some things to consider.

Adapting to new technology isn’t immoral. “We have to recalibrate our sense of what’s acceptable. There was a time when every teacher said: ‘Oh, it’s cheating to use Wikipedia.’ And guess what? We got used to it, we decided it’s reputable enough, and we cite Wikipedia all the time,” says Noah Giansiracusa, an associate math professor at Bentley University who hosts the podcast “ AI in Academia: Navigating the Future .”

“There’s a calibration period where a technology is new and untested. It’s good to be cautious and to treat it with trepidation. Then, over time, the norms kind of adapt,” he says — just like new-fangled graphing calculators or the internet in days of yore.

“I think the current conversation around AI should not be centered on an issue with plagiarism. It should be centered on how AI will alter methods for learning and expressing oneself. ‘Catching’ students who use fully AI-generated products ... implies a ‘gotcha’ atmosphere,” says Jim Nagle, a history teacher at Bedford High School. “Since AI is already a huge part of our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise our students are making it a part of their academic tool kit. Teachers and students should be at the forefront of discussions about responsible and ethical use.”

Teachers and parents could use AI to think about education at a higher level. Really, learning is about more than regurgitating information — or it should be, anyway. But regurgitation is what AI does best.

“If our system is just for students to write a bunch of essays and then grade the results? Something’s missing. We need to really talk about their purpose and what they’re getting out of this, and maybe think about different forms of assignments and grading,” Giansiracusa says.

After all, while AI aggregates and organizes ideas, the quality of its responses depends on the users’ prompts. Instead of recoiling from it, use it as a conversation-starter.

“What parents and teachers can do is to start the conversation with kids: ‘What are we trying to learn here? Is it even something that ChatGPT could answer? Why did your assignment not convince you that you need to do this thinking on your own when a tool can do it for you?’” says Houman Harouni , a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harouni urges parents to read an essay written by ChatGPT alongside their student. Was it good? What could be done better? Did it feel like a short cut?

“What they’re going to remember is that you had that conversation with them; that someone thought, at some point in their lives, that taking a shortcut is not the best way ... especially if you do it with the tool right in front of you, because you have something real to talk about,” he says.

Harouni hopes teachers think about its implications, too. Consider math: So much grunt work has been eliminated by calculators and computers. Yet kids are still tested as in days of old, when perhaps they could expand their learning to be assessed in ways that are more personal and human-centric, leaving the rote stuff to AI.

“We could take this moment of confusion and loss of certainty seriously, at least in some small pockets, and start thinking about what a different kind of school would look like. Five years from now, we might have the beginnings of some very interesting exploration. Five years from now, you and I might be talking about schools wherein teaching and learning is happening in a very self-directed way, in a way that’s more based on … igniting the kid’s interest and seeing where they go and supporting them to go deeper and to go wider,” Harouni says.

Teachers have the chance to offer assignments with more intentionality.

“Really think about the purpose of the assignments. Don’t just think of the outcome and the deliverable: ‘I need a student to produce a document.’ Why are we getting students to write? Why are we doing all these things in the first place? If teachers are more mindful, and maybe parents can also be more mindful, I think it pushes us away from this dangerous trap of thinking about in terms of ‘cheating,’ which, to me, is a really slippery path,” Giansiracusa says.

AI can boost confidence and reduce procrastination. Sometimes, a robot can do something better than a human, such as writing a dreaded resume and cover letter. And that’s OK; it’s useful, even.

“Often, students avoid applying to internships because they’re just overwhelmed at the thought of writing a cover letter, or they’re afraid their resume isn’t good enough. I think that tools like this can help them feel more confident. They may be more likely to do it sooner and have more organized and better applications,” says Kristin Casasanto, director of post-graduate planning at Olin College of Engineering.

Casasanto says that AI is also useful for de-stressing during interview prep.

“Students can use generative AI to plug in a job description and say, ‘Come up with a list of interview questions based on the job description,’ which will give them an idea of what may be asked, and they can even then say, ‘Here’s my resume. Give me answers to these questions based on my skills and experience.’ They’re going to really build their confidence around that,” Casasanto says.

Plus, when students use AI for basics, it frees up more time to meet with career counselors about substantive issues.

“It will help us as far as scalability. … Career services staff can then utilize our personal time in much more meaningful ways with students,” Casasanto says.

We need to remember: These kids grew up during a pandemic. We can’t expect kids to resist technology when they’ve been forced to learn in new ways since COVID hit.

“Now we’re seeing pandemic-era high school students come into college. They’ve been channeled through Google Classroom their whole career,” says Katherine Jewell, a history professor at Fitchburg State University.

“They need to have technology management and information literacy built into the curriculum,” Jewell says.

Jewell recently graded a paper on the history of college sports. It was obvious which papers were written by AI: They didn’t address the question. In her syllabus, Jewell defines plagiarism as “any attempt by a student to represent the work of another, including computers, as their own.”

This means that AI qualifies, but she also has an open mind, given students’ circumstances.

“My students want to do the right thing, for the most part. They don’t want to get away with stuff. I understand why they turned to these tools; I really do. I try to reassure them that I’m here to help them learn systems. I’m focusing much more on the learning process. I incentivize them to improve, and I acknowledge: ‘You don’t know how to do this the first time out of the gate,’” Jewell says. “I try to incentivize them so that they’re improving their confidence in their abilities, so they don’t feel the need to turn to these tools.”

Understand the forces that make kids resort to AI in the first place . Clubs, sports, homework: Kids are busy and under pressure. Why not do what’s easy?

“Kids are so overscheduled in their day-to-day lives. I think there’s so much enormous pressure on these kids, whether it’s self-inflicted, parent-inflicted, or school-culture inflicted. It’s on them to maximize their schedule. They’ve learned that AI can be a way to take an assignment that would take five hours and cut it down to one,” says a teacher at a competitive high school outside Boston who asked to remain anonymous.

Recently, this teacher says, “I got papers back that were just so robotic and so cold. I had to tell [students]: ‘I understand that you tried to use a tool to help you. I’m not going to penalize you, but what I am going to penalize you for is that you didn’t actually answer the prompt.”

Afterward, more students felt safe to come forward to say they’d used AI. This teacher hopes that age restrictions become implemented for these programs, similar to apps such as Snapchat. Educationally and developmentally, they say, high-schoolers are still finding their voice — a voice that could be easily thwarted by a robot.

“Part of high school writing is to figure out who you are, and what is your voice as a writer. And I think, developmentally, that takes all of high school to figure out,” they say.

And AI can’t replicate voice and personality — for now, at least.

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• How to write an essay introduction | 4 steps & examples

How to Write an Essay Introduction | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on February 4, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A good introduction paragraph is an essential part of any academic essay . It sets up your argument and tells the reader what to expect.

The main goals of an introduction are to:

• Catch your reader’s attention.
• Give background on your topic.
• Present your thesis statement —the central point of your essay.

This introduction example is taken from our interactive essay example on the history of Braille.

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

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Table of contents

Step 1: hook your reader, step 2: give background information, step 3: present your thesis statement, step 4: map your essay’s structure, step 5: check and revise, more examples of essay introductions, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the essay introduction.

Your first sentence sets the tone for the whole essay, so spend some time on writing an effective hook.

Avoid long, dense sentences—start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader’s curiosity.

The hook should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of the topic you’re writing about and why it’s interesting. Avoid overly broad claims or plain statements of fact.

Examples: Writing a good hook

Take a look at these examples of weak hooks and learn how to improve them.

• Braille was an extremely important invention.
• The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

The first sentence is a dry fact; the second sentence is more interesting, making a bold claim about exactly  why the topic is important.

• The internet is defined as “a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities.”
• The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education.

Avoid using a dictionary definition as your hook, especially if it’s an obvious term that everyone knows. The improved example here is still broad, but it gives us a much clearer sense of what the essay will be about.

• Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein is a famous book from the nineteenth century.
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement.

Instead of just stating a fact that the reader already knows, the improved hook here tells us about the mainstream interpretation of the book, implying that this essay will offer a different interpretation.

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Next, give your reader the context they need to understand your topic and argument. Depending on the subject of your essay, this might include:

• Historical, geographical, or social context
• An outline of the debate you’re addressing
• A summary of relevant theories or research about the topic
• Definitions of key terms

The information here should be broad but clearly focused and relevant to your argument. Don’t give too much detail—you can mention points that you will return to later, but save your evidence and interpretation for the main body of the essay.

How much space you need for background depends on your topic and the scope of your essay. In our Braille example, we take a few sentences to introduce the topic and sketch the social context that the essay will address:

Now it’s time to narrow your focus and show exactly what you want to say about the topic. This is your thesis statement —a sentence or two that sums up your overall argument.

This is the most important part of your introduction. A  good thesis isn’t just a statement of fact, but a claim that requires evidence and explanation.

The goal is to clearly convey your own position in a debate or your central point about a topic.

Particularly in longer essays, it’s helpful to end the introduction by signposting what will be covered in each part. Keep it concise and give your reader a clear sense of the direction your argument will take.

As you research and write, your argument might change focus or direction as you learn more.

For this reason, it’s often a good idea to wait until later in the writing process before you write the introduction paragraph—it can even be the very last thing you write.

When you’ve finished writing the essay body and conclusion , you should return to the introduction and check that it matches the content of the essay.

It’s especially important to make sure your thesis statement accurately represents what you do in the essay. If your argument has gone in a different direction than planned, tweak your thesis statement to match what you actually say.

To polish your writing, you can use something like a paraphrasing tool .

You can use the checklist below to make sure your introduction does everything it’s supposed to.

Checklist: Essay introduction

My first sentence is engaging and relevant.

I have introduced the topic with necessary background information.

I have defined any important terms.

My thesis statement clearly presents my main point or argument.

Everything in the introduction is relevant to the main body of the essay.

You have a strong introduction - now make sure the rest of your essay is just as good.

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This introduction to an argumentative essay sets up the debate about the internet and education, and then clearly states the position the essay will argue for.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

This introduction to a short expository essay leads into the topic (the invention of the printing press) and states the main point the essay will explain (the effect of this invention on European society).

In many ways, the invention of the printing press marked the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval period in Europe is often remembered as a time of intellectual and political stagnation. Prior to the Renaissance, the average person had very limited access to books and was unlikely to be literate. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century allowed for much less restricted circulation of information in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation.

This introduction to a literary analysis essay , about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , starts by describing a simplistic popular view of the story, and then states how the author will give a more complex analysis of the text’s literary devices.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale. Arguably the first science fiction novel, its plot can be read as a warning about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, and in popular culture representations of the character as a “mad scientist”, Victor Frankenstein represents the callous, arrogant ambition of modern science. However, far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to gradually transform our impression of Frankenstein, portraying him in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

The “hook” is the first sentence of your essay introduction . It should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of why it’s interesting.

To write a good hook, avoid overly broad statements or long, dense sentences. Try to start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader’s curiosity.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

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How to Resist the Temptation of AI When Writing

Whether you're a student, a journalist, or a business professional, knowing how to do high-quality research and writing using trustworthy data and sources, without giving in to the temptation of AI or ChatGPT , is a skill worth developing.

As I detail in my book Writing That Gets Noticed , locating credible databases and sources and accurately vetting information can be the difference between turning a story around quickly or getting stuck with outdated information.

For example, several years ago the editor of Parents.com asked for a hot-take reaction to country singer Carrie Underwood saying that, because she was 35, she had missed her chance at having another baby. Since I had written about getting pregnant in my forties, I knew that as long as I updated my facts and figures, and included supportive and relevant peer-reviewed research, I could pull off this story. And I did.

The story ran later that day , and it led to other assignments. Here are some tips I’ve learned that you should consider mastering before you turn to automated tools like generative AI to handle your writing work for you.

Identify experts, peer-reviewed research study authors, and sources who can speak with authority—and ideally, offer easily understood sound bites or statistics on the topic of your work. Great sources include professors at major universities and media spokespeople at associations and organizations.

For example, writer and author William Dameron pinned his recent essay in HuffPost Personal around a statistic from the American Heart Association on how LGBTQ people experience higher rates of heart disease based on discrimination. Although he first found the link in a secondary source (an article in The New York Times ), he made sure that he checked the primary source: the original study that the American Heart Association gleaned the statistic from. He verified the information, as should any writer, because anytime a statistic is cited in a secondary source, errors can be introduced.

Jen Malia, author of  The Infinity Rainbow Club  series of children’s books (whom I recently interviewed on my podcast ), recently wrote a piece about dinosaur-bone hunting for Business Insider , which she covers in her book Violet and the Jurassic Land Exhibit.

After a visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Malia, whose books are set in Philadelphia, found multiple resources online and on the museum site that gave her the history of the Bone Wars , information on the exhibits she saw, and the scientific names of the dinosaurs she was inspired by. She also used the Library of Congress’ website, which offers digital collections and links to the Library of Congress Newspaper Collection.

Malia is a fan of searching for additional resources and citable documents with Google Scholar . “If I find that a secondary source mentions a newspaper article, I’m going to go to the original newspaper article, instead of just stopping there and quoting,” she says.

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Your local public library is a great source of free information, journals, and databases (even ones that generally require a subscription and include embargoed research). For example, your search should include everything from health databases ( Sage Journals , Scopus , PubMed) to databases for academic sources and journalism ( American Periodical Series Online , Statista , Academic Search Premier ) and databases for news, trends, market research, and polls (t he Harris Poll , Pew Research Center , Newsbank , ProPublica ).

Even if you find a study or paper that you can’t access in one of those databases, consider reaching out to the study’s lead author or researcher. In many cases, they’re happy to discuss their work and may even share the study with you directly and offer to talk about their research.

For journalist Paulette Perhach’s article on ADHD in The New York Times, she used Epic Research to see “dual team studies.” That's when two independent teams address the same topic or question, and ideally come to the same conclusions. She recommends locating research and experts via key associations for your topic. She also likes searching via Google Scholar but advises filtering it for studies and research in recent years to avoid using old data. She suggests keeping your links and research organized. “Always be ready to be peer-reviewed yourself,” Perhach says.

When you are looking for information for a story or project, you might be inclined to start with a regular Google search. But keep in mind that the internet is full of false information, and websites that look trustworthy can sometimes turn out to be businesses or companies with a vested interest in you taking their word as objective fact without additional scrutiny. Regardless of your writing project, unreliable or biased sources are a great way to torpedo your work—and any hope of future work.

Author Bobbi Rebell researched her book Launching Financial Grownups using the IRS’ website . “I might say that you can contribute a certain amount to a 401K, but it might be outdated because those numbers are always changing, and it’s important to be accurate,” she says. “AI and ChatGPT can be great for idea generation,” says Rebell, “but you have to be careful. If you are using an article someone was quoted in, you don’t know if they were misquoted or quoted out of context.”

If you use AI and ChatGPT for sourcing, you not only risk introducing errors, you risk introducing plagiarism—there is a reason OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is being sued for downloading information from all those books.

Audrey Clare Farley, who writes historical nonfiction, has used a plethora of sites for historical research, including Women Also Know History , which allows searches by expertise or area of study, and JSTOR , a digital library database that offers a number of free downloads a month. She also uses Chronicling America , a project from the Library of Congress which gathers old newspapers to show how a historical event was reported, and Newspapers.com (which you can access via free trial but requires a subscription after seven days).

When it comes to finding experts, Farley cautions against choosing the loudest voices on social media platforms. “They might not necessarily be the most authoritative. I vet them by checking if they have a history of publication on the topic, and/or educational credentials.”

When vetting an expert, look for these red flags:

• You can’t find their work published or cited anywhere.
• They were published in an obscure journal.
• Their research is funded by a company, not a university, or they are the spokesperson for the company they are doing research for. (This makes them a public relations vehicle and not an appropriate source for journalism.)

And finally, the best endings for virtually any writing, whether it’s an essay, a research paper, an academic report, or a piece of investigative journalism, circle back to the beginning of the piece, and show your reader the transformation or the journey the piece has presented in perspective.

As always, your goal should be strong writing supported by research that makes an impact without cutting corners. Only then can you explore tools that might make the job a little easier, for instance by generating subheads or discovering a concept you might be missing—because then you'll have the experience and skills to see whether it's harming or helping your work.

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The tell-tale signs students are using chatgpt to help write their essays.

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Researchers have identified key features of ChatGPT-generated content that makes it easier to spot ... [+] (Pic: Getty Creative)

Researchers have identified tell-tale signs that students have used AI to help write their essays.

Excessive used of words derived from Latin, using unnecessary words and repeated use of the Oxford comma are among the hallmarks of using a generative chatbot to complete coursework, researchers found .

But while students taking part in the trial said they found using AI had some advantages, they acknowledged that relying on it completely would likely result in work of a low standard.

The impact of generative AI on education has been exercising educators since Open AI launched ChatGPT — a chatbot that generates text by predicting which words are likely to follow a particular prompt — in November 2022.

While some regard AI as a potentially transformative technology, creating a more inclusive and personalized education, for others it makes it impossible to trust coursework grades. Even academics have not been immune to using AI to enhance their work.

Now researchers at Cambridge University have tried to see if they could identify characteristics of AI’s writing style that could make it easy to spot.

And although their trial was small scale, they say it has the potential to help teachers work out which students used AI in their essays, and which did not.

Three undergraduates were enlisted to write two essays each with the help of ChatGPT, which were then compared with essays on the same topic written by 164 high school students. The undergraduates were then interviewed about their experience of using AI.

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(Undergraduates were included in the study because ChatGPT requires users to be 18 or over).

The ChatGPT essays performed better on average, being marked particularly highly for ‘information’ and ‘reflection’. They did poorly, however, for ‘analysis’ and ‘comparison’ — differences the researchers suggest reflect the chatbot’s strengths and weaknesses.

But when it comes to style, there were a number of features that made the ChatGPT assisted version easily recognizable.

The default AI style “echoes the bland, clipped, and objective style that characterizes much generic journalistic writing found on the internet,” according to the researchers, who identified a number of key features of ChatGPT content:

• A high frequency of words with a Latin root, particularly multisyllable words and a vocabulary above the expected level;
• Paragraphs starting with specific markers, such as ‘however’, ‘moreover’ and ‘overall’, followed by a comma;
• Numbered lists, with items followed by colons;
• Pleonasms: using unnecessary words, such as ‘free gift’ or ‘true fact’;
• Tautology: saying the same thing twice, such as ‘We must come together to unite’;
• Repeating words or phrases;
• Consistent use of Oxford commas, a comma used after the penultimate item in a list, before ‘and’ or ‘or’, for example “ChatGPT has many uses for teaching, learning at home, revision, and assessment”.

Although the students taking part in the trial used ChatGPT to different extents, from copying and pasting whole passages to using it as prompts for further research, there was broad agreement that it was useful for gathering information quickly, and that it could be integrated into essay writing through specific prompts, on topics and essay structure, for example.

But the students also agreed that using AI to write the essay would produce work of a low academic standard.

“Despite the small sample size, we are excited about these findings as they have the capacity to inform the work of teachers as well as students,” said Jude Brady of Cambridge University Press and Assessment, lead researcher on the study.

Future work should include larger and more representative sample sizes of students, she said. Learning to use and detect generative AI was an increasingly important part of digital literacy, she added.

“We hope our research might help people to identify when a piece of text has been written by ChatGPT,” she said.

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All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld review – bracing and brilliant essay collection

The iconoclastic US author’s intellectually poised critique of minimalism boasts scintillating writing of breadth and power

B ecca Rothfeld is a dynamo. I had not come across her before picking up All Things Are Too Small and was unprepared for the book’s extraordinary clout and reach. She is an American journalist (a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times and a critic on the Washington Post ), a philosopher, polemicist and a wit. She challenges, in this bracing, original and intellectually poised collection of essays, many of our unquestioning modern assumptions and, most persuasively, takes aim at the promotion of minimalism as an ideal for our living spaces, novels and ourselves.

Nothing, in Rothfeld’s view, succeeds like excess and she packs so much into her opening essay about why it is OK to want more (the most extravagant of Oliver Twists) that you feel richly fed before even turning the first page. She includes the 13th-century Dutch mystic Hadewijch of Brabant ( from whom her title is taken ), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick , the critic James Wood and even makes time to sympathise with a random man sighted in a restaurant who wolfed down three dishes of pasta in a row, commenting that he wouldn’t have had to have third helpings “if any plate available were big enough”.

Inevitably, Rothfeld, revelling in plurality, does not neglect to launch a scornful attack on an obvious target: tidying guru Marie Kondo . She claims to be nonplussed by Kondo’s notorious method, which she describes as “touching items to determine whether they ‘spark joy’, then summarily tossing anything that induces more complex emotions, or, God forbid, thought”. To be thought-free is something of which Rothfeld herself is incapable. She rails against blank-slateism. She notes that “the mechanism by which tossing old T-shirts is supposed to effect rebirth remains hazy”. She broods about whether “stuffing the local landfill is sufficient to effect widespread egalitarian overhaul”. And there is – naturally – more. She convincingly laments the decluttering of contemporary literature, which she believes has produced many self-involved, overpruned and fragmented novels. She includes a respectful yet highly critical and underwhelmed essay on Sally Rooney and her “politically anodyne” work.

I enjoy trying to declutter and recognise the value of mindfulness (a decluttering, with any luck, of the mind) but this did not spoil my delight at her refreshingly unconvinced essay on the subject. She describes her “virtuous boredom” trying to meditate and absolute lack of interest in what her own breath is doing. Above all, she denounces the way that meditation, as she sees it, encourages a defeatist passivity. In a fiercely unequal world, she argues, trying to persuade people to accept unfair circumstances is unacceptable. Mindfulness “falsely assumes that our dissatisfaction is always attributable to mental mismanagement, never to circumstances of genuine injustice”.

Elsewhere, Rothfeld writes where devils fear to tread – about sex, beauty and desire and about consumption and consummation. There is a brilliant and startling essay, The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy, which includes a description of the lust she feels for her husband. I kept wondering how he might feel about this tribute (imagining him, sitting in armchair, hands over eyes). The obvious question she gives rise to is: can you have – or be – too much of a good thing? She writes scaldingly about “new puritan” writers Christine Emba and Louise Perry, and emphasises that the erotic is “its own wild creature, for which there is (and can be) no established idiom”. She exposes the stifling conservatism of Emba and Perry and the tyranny to which their prudish conclusions lead.

In the acknowledgments, Rothfeld thanks her editor for “trusting me to write at ecstatic length”. And it is part of her scintillating achievement, in this book of appetite, to make one vow never again to use the phrase “less is more” under any circumstances. And yet, having said that, it is also the case – whisper it – that Rothfeld, who writes with such zest, could have got away with painlessly trimming one or two of these essays. And this is because, as a brilliant and decisive iconoclast, she also has the potential to be precisely what she would like to avoid: a compendious miniaturist.

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