Education not taken for granted
This past week I had the opportunity to chat with a woman named Margaret who is working on her GED. Margaret is a middle-aged woman who dropped out of school in her early high school years to take care of her family. She is now going blind due to macular degeneration. But this hasn’t stopped her passion for finally having a high school diploma. As I talked to her she chatted freely about missed opportunities, but loved her family enough to be okay with how her life had gone. At her GED program, Margaret has been writing a story that has taken her months to create and edit. The idea of using a computer made her nervous, but she hung in there. She beamed as she told me that her story had been entered in a contest for all the GED programs in the state. Education has opened a world to this sweet woman. I felt priviledged to sit and chat with her about her life and how important education was even at her age.
Today we have the Internet and information at our fingertips 24/7. It seems a shame to read in the paper everyday about American students not doing as well as international counterparts or that the nation’s dropout rate is rising. Kids today could take a lesson from Margaret who left education in a generation where family survival made dropping out necessary. Today even with permanent blindness looming closer, she realizes what an opportunity she has and can’t wait to go to school each week and learn. We can all learn from Margaret and people like her who go back to finish their education even under tremendous odds. She is truly an inspiration and I will never look at education through the same eyes again.
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