As David Foster Wallace said: “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
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That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
So many people have this misconception about school; they believe that we, students, go to get smart. However, as always is the case, this so called “smartness” is all relative, it is not intelligence. Being intelligent is not memorizing information to print on a test, it is not getting a good SAT score, it is not a competition for the highest GPA. One’s intelligence and worth is by no means measured by their academic achievements, although the way our current society works, this may seem to be the case. In high school, we’ve gained knowledge and intelligence not by the books we read, although that may or may not add into it, but rather by the things we experience in our life. The hard times, the good times, the sad, the bad, there are many ways to describe it, for it’s not some kind of a test, it’s life, and it’s so incredibly complex, that a single word cannot describe our collective experiences. I’m sure that everyone graduating with me
