Pass It On - Rtr. Kashuni Kariyawasam

Article which won the second place of the Write Out Loud competition organized by Rotaract Club of University of Moratuwa

Category – Education

Rtr. Kashuni Kariyawasam – Rotaract Club of University of Moratuwa

“The sole purpose of life has been to pass on what was learned. There was no higher purpose.”
-Extracted from the movie Lucy (2014)-

Education, according to the Wikipedia, is “the process of facilitating learning, or acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits”. In congruence with this definition, education is not limited to the knowledge one would gain at school or university although that’s how most people would put it; it relates to every single experience a living being would gather from the creation of the first cell inside the womb to the demise of the last cell of its body. Simply, as the famous writer Stephen Mitchell describes it, education is a continuing process of growth and development from birth until death.

Education has been identified as a very important aspect for the development of a person as well as the whole world, and therefore most governments as well as UNESCO have granted education as a fundamental human right. Educating a person can happen in two ways; either through self-learning, or via guidance. Some might find themselves more efficient at self-learning, although despite the fact that it’s called “self learning”, it is also actually a kind of guided learning where one would teach himself either by referring to someone else’s work or experience, or by building up his own theories and trying to put them into practice. At school, a child would learn subject matter as well as social and interpersonal skills by associating his teachers and friends. Starting from preschool, one can go up to his higher studies in an academic path and end up transferring the knowledge thus accumulated to others, whereas some might actually use their creative vision and critical thinking to gift the mankind with marvels and take life to the next stage.

‘Ignorance is what brings chaos.’ If someone doesn’t warn a child not to play with fire, he might put his fingers in there and burn them. A person deprived of a proper education has a higher possibility of ending up losing his course of life than someone who has had the right type of education. Such is the difference between a cancer cell and a healthy cell. The cancer cell is ignorant of what it should do to maintain life, and thus produces more and more of those catastrophic cells and ends up leading the host to the death bed, although the cancer cell doesn’t realize that it would lead itself to death too.

Imagine what would’ve happened if the man who discovered fire did not teach somebody else how to do it. And even if he did, what if that somebody else didn’t teach another? That knowledge would’ve been buried underground with him, and although another person would have discovered it later, it would’ve taken up more time for humankind to advance. This is where the true definition of the word “education” lies; passing on what one has learned. So if you ever wonder what you should do with even the slightest bit of knowledge you have gained, don’t hesitate. ‘Just like any single cell going through time, pass it on.’