Everyone Deserves Knowledge by Mako

Everyone Deserves Knowledge by Mako - September 2025 Scholarship Essay

The more you look around, the more you see it. People no longer care about education- they're content using AI to generate everything they need, and it’s throwing a wrench in the education system. But that’s not the full story, is it?

Education in the next ten years needs a revamp. This can’t start until stepping stones are laid out, though. Something that’s not often mentioned when discussing education is how vital basic necessities are to it. Many students struggle due to not having their basic needs met. If you have no food at home, you’re going to worry more about what you’ll be eating in the next few days than what's happening in school. Communities need to work together to make sure everyone has their basic needs met, or it won’t matter how wonderful the education itself is. The greatest, most impactful people in the future can come from any background, but we’ll never be able to see what they can do if they’re never given the opportunity to learn.

It’s glaringly apparent that education needs to be more accessible. We have the means to share education widely with technology- people living all over the world now have access to devices. These should be making it easier to get education out there to adults and children alike. Adults need sufficient programs to learn with, both to catch up with what they may have missed in school, and to learn new things. It should be seen as a brave thing to gain more power in your life by learning, not embarrassing that you don’t know something yet. My grandma was the first one on my mom’s side of the family to graduate. My great-grandma went back to high school as an adult. The things that once seemed impossible for my family are now possible- my cousins and I have or are in the process of completing high school on time, and we all have the opportunity to pursue a higher education. I want this to be possible for everyone.

Once people have the opportunity to learn, the focus can shift to making the education system itself more functional. One of the biggest changes that needs to happen is shifting from pre-set, standardized education to something more tailored to a student’s needs. To that end, every learning style should be accommodated and encouraged, and students who need more time to learn something should be given that time. We need to be able to explain both what students need to learn and why it’s important. Students don’t want to learn something they view as pointless. Explaining the ‘why’ will often help students feel as though their time is valued. It should also be pointed out to them that knowledge is the one thing that can never be taken from them. That makes it the most valuable thing someone has. My family told me that all the time while I was growing up.

More than simply changing the way things are taught, I hope that we as a society shift towards being grateful to educators and librarians. They should be highly respected and fairly compensated, because they’re the ones working to give people the most valuable thing in life.

Banning things may seem like an easy way to make sure kids don’t come home with “the wrong ideas,” but in the long run it does more harm than good. Blanket bans are both confusing and scary- they make it harder for a teacher to do their job as an educator by shifting their focus to what can and cannot be said instead of students’ needs. In ten years, we should stop trying to place bans on knowledge. Students will grow up to have their own beliefs and ideas, because they’re their own people- and that should be celebrated. It means they were well-educated.

I mentioned AI in my first paragraph to catch your attention. While it’s very true that AI is becoming part of our lives, it will only take over if we let it. Teaching people how to utilize this technology without removing human input entirely is vital. AI is capable of doing everything for someone, but it does more damage than good to use it that way. An individual’s thoughts, ideas, and knowledge are all powerful, and replacing those with something generated harms that individual by both negating the ability to truly form relationships with other people, and by snatching the opportunity one has in every interaction to learn. The damage needs to be clearly explained in places of learning rather than simply trying to ban AI’s use- the technology is getting better, and soon it won’t be possible to tell by looking at something whether AI was involved.

These all may seem ambitious to happen in only ten years. That isn’t the point. I hope that within ten years, we'll have begun to carry out some of the things I’ve written about. I hope that, even if it takes fifty, a hundred, or more years still, these things will happen. I hope we start laying out the stepping stones to make a better education system within ten years.

If there’s one thing you take from my essay, let it be this: knowledge is the most valuable thing someone has, and we should be doing everything in our power to let as many people as possible access it.