gratitude for education
I've been feeling an increased amount of gratitude towards education the past few weeks. Hard to describe, but I just feel so full of love and happiness thinking about being able to afford and access education. No matter if it's books, whole degrees with online study materials and scripts, courses, or Wikipedia.
I wasn't always super motivated to study, especially not at school, but I mostly got by without studying or homework. Having to do it in a forced and standardized way just really sucks the life out of it, though that experience never changed that I am generally a curious person that's always looking to learn more and teach myself things. I'll get lost in new interests compiling lists and sheets and facts, collecting pictures and guides and all kinds of bookmarks; I'll invest in courses (back then, on sites like Udemy) and binge YouTube videos about it. I'll forget to eat and sleep while teaching myself. It's been that way with a large variety of interests, many of which I don't even do anymore, but were really beneficial anyway.
The best compliment someone ever gave me was saying that I sound like I read Wikipedia all day. I hope I can keep that up.
I just think to myself sometimes: What an unprecedented time in history for knowledge transfer and access to all kinds of information. The intense rate that all kinds of videos, courses, zines, books and articles are published! And it's much easier to access, to read, and to even hear about it existing. Even if you can't get the original yourself, you might be able to get a pirated copy, or a summary. If you don't understand it, there's online spaces and videos of people trying to explain it in laymen terms. You can meet up with people to discuss texts digitally or in real life! Reading and writing is common and normalized. You can just publish something for millions to see without having to go through publishers or newspapers that gatekeep the reach. You don't need to be very wealthy or influential to do that. That's just amazing. You can learn in a week what others historically learned in a lifetime.
I also feel honored to be able to get educated for other reasons: It's simply not a given, or depending on your area, it hasn't been a given for a long time that women can get the same education, or any education at all. Girls in Germany started attending schools only in 1893. Universities here started officially accepting women in 1900 with some rare exceptions before - only almost a 100 years before I was born. That's now a single life span. There are cases like Malala Yousafzai that show it's not yet over everywhere.
We tend to take it for granted and forget how different it was even for our grandmothers. I think a lot about the fact that my mother was born in the year when they finally allowed wives to become legally competent in Germany; and she was 8 years old when wives were allowed to hold jobs without asking their husband's permission. 7 years before she was born, women weren't even allowed to have their own bank accounts. All that affected my grandmothers, who are still alive. It's easy to think all that was ages ago and a temporary mistake we have fixed now, but it's been a thing going on for hundreds of years that has only been fully lifted in my and my mothers' lifetime. The line of women I come from barely had any rights, and yours probably too.
Being educated and further pursuing education is special to me and an honor to all the women that came before me who were so artificially limited and oppressed. It's so much easier to know better, to fight for yourself, to remove yourself from bad situations and to create a good life for yourself if you are educated. You know about what's possible, you know the facts, you have the qualifications for better jobs, you carry yourself differently and you are better at expressing what you feel and need. You are in a better place to advocate for yourself and others. It's so much harder to get you with manipulation, disinformation, conspiracies and gaslighting. With a solid education and qualifications, you are less dependent on bad people to survive. It enables you to have an escape plan and another support network.
Education connects people, it makes people grow into themselves, it lights up your passion and helps you find a purpose, if you wish. It helps you cultivate a rich inner life. It can be a great source of pride and self-confidence. Enrolling in courses and reading books is such a great way to invest in yourself. It builds great character, resilience, and patience; it fosters a different level of trust in yourself.
It doesn't have to be expensive, or elite academia that can feel inherently exclusionary and overly competitive. Whatever you can do, even if is for free on YouTube or Google Scholar or the Internet Archive, do it. Read it. Take notes. It really is a privilege and as fast as it came, it might go.
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Published 15 Apr, 2025