16:16
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”-Malcolm X
Growing up, I learned that success is contingent on education. My childhood was constituted of an unsuppressed yearning to find answers, and piles upon piles of Anatomy and Physiology textbooks (which, as a six-year-old, I could only understand so much).
As years pass and simple multiplication worksheets become differential calculus textbooks, you start to realize how much of our education we take for granted. The countless “I hate school”s and the “Mom I don’t want to do my homework”s that we hear ever so often, not only show how the decline of school corporal punishment led to the gradual reduction in discipline of Gen.Z but reveal to us the ignorance many of us have to the blessing of accessible education systems. No, I am not criticizing the unchangeable state of mind that society has implemented into our brains, but I do intend to remind you that there are people in this world who would sacrifice anything to have the opportunity to make the one paragraph literature responses that we despise so greatly.
The moral of the story is, we have all fallen victim to apathy and the side effects of excess. We forget that truly, access to education is a privilege and is everyone’s ticket to a brighter future. One of my goals when I started Project RIPPLES, was to make sure I was able to give others the opportunity to learn; especially in places where formal education is nothing but an aspiration. Thanks to Susan Pesinable, Project RIPPLES was able to connect to school children in the Philippines and supply them with school supplies and a working computer.
In third world countries like the Philippines, children stop continuing their schooling at very young ages, utterly, due to the inability of many families to afford it. This significantly differs from that of our reality where here, in the United States, it is by law for every child to receive a formal education. If all children, despite their circumstances, had the right to formal education, the problems that obstruct us today, will cease to remain in our tomorrow. Every time a child in the Philippines benefits from our small deeds, it inspires them to continue to look forward to an education and a better tomorrow.
It is truly not the raw amount of supplies and donations we can give that makes the world a better place. It is the hope we give to these children that there is a brighter future for themselves.
From Project Ripple's bottle collection, we are able to buy school supplies like these for the school children.