For your first response paper, you explained why you were here and what kept you motivated. Now that you’ve got through the semester, we will circle back to a broader version of this question: What is the impact of an education? Or put another way, what is education? To reflect on this, choose one of the quotes below from Educated, and write a 300 word response. Bring to our “exam” on Weds, 12/11.

1. “All my studying, reading, thinking, traveling, had it transformed me into someone who no longer belonged anywhere? I thought of the girl who, knowing nothing beyond her junkyard and her mountain, had stared at a screen, watching as two planes sailed into strange white pillars. Her classroom was a heap of junk. Her textbooks, slates of scrap. And yet she had something precious that I – despite all my opportunities, or maybe because of them – did not” (p. 312).
2. “I returned to the chapter I had written nearly two years before at Harvard. Again I read Hume, Rouseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations – to friends, to society, to themselves?” (p. 317).
3. “The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones [my old self] would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
   You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
   I call it an education” (p. 329)