My time at St. Xavier has been constructive and highly beneficial, however, I believe that it is the cave and that life after school is the light. The school does not accurately reflect the real world and it has three major illusions: that you must work for someone else, that learning should only be done in school, and that the world is not diverse.
For the past four years, excluding summer, how I spend my time has been dictated largely by teachers. Monday through Friday for seven hours a day plus a few hours in the evening, I’ll be listening to whatever lecture has been planned out and completing whatever homework has been assigned. Although I often find these things valuable, sometimes I know for fact that I am just wasting my time, like when I had to very neatly color a biology diagram, which in the end, was still not neat enough for the teacher. In a way, I have six different bosses. When I graduate high school and eventually college, I have always planned on being a business owner and working for myself. Everything I have been trained to do up to this point however, has prepared me to
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The illusions that I believed in here will be shattered. I think I will have achieved more clarity in realizing what was important during my time at St. Xavier and realizing that certain things were trivial though they seemed so crucial in the moment. If I ever came back and visited St. Xavier, I would be in a position similar to the man who comes back to the cave having already been in the light. Socrates says, “When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the cave.” With newly acquired skills from the real world, I expect that I will be able to look on towards the younger generation of bombers with a desire to see that they too step out of the cave