One of my favorite quote is that of Malcolm X that says, “The mind is a terrible thing to waste,” which the United Negro College found as adopted as their slogan. Now I can relate to that slogan first hand. After my graduation from high school in 2007, I went to a tech school and studied computer tech. However in the summer of 2008 I decided to get a job for the summer while I refocus myself about what it is that I want to do. Three summer months became three long years and while working I did not put my mind into anything academic, or intellectual to build my mind up. I was literally wasting away. Writing started to get harder, reading I was not doing much to start with, so I got even worse.
I have always say to myself, everything a person has can be taken away from him, but what a person knows intellectually is permanent and forever. No one can remove or take it away unless the person don’t do anything with it, then what the person has learned will waste away. That is one of the mean reasons why I love been educated and still long to know more. The mind is like a muscle, when a muscle is not challenge or worked it fades. Same with the mind, when it is not constantly being educated it wastes away. That is why I am pursuing higher education.
I come from a country in which everything can be taken away from you in a flash by a civil war or by injustice from the corrupted government. Anybody who has been through a civil war knows that the only thing you come out with if your life is spared is your intellect, what you know and nothing else. My experience makes me value education and if there was anything else above a higher education I would seek it too, for it is something no one can out a price on.
I Values education because I know that if I lose every materials possession I can acquire it back as long as I am intellectually stable. Now let say I am not educated and have worked my entire life, bought a house, a car and I am not educated. At that point if I would lose my job and for that reason can’t make payments on the house and the car, I would lose it all. I would take me more longer time to get those things back, then if I was educated. I have seen it many time in the African community, when people had slave themselves in their work and had it all before a civil war broke out, and after ward they lost everything. With the grace of God when they make to the states it’s extremely arduous to earn a living because they have not education.
With all that and my own experience a higher education is a necessity. It’s a life long process that I mind not wasting. No matter how long it takes I am willing to go through the steps to acquire a higher intellect, because the mind is an awful thing to waste.
