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MCAT Essay Sample
This sample essay is an example of the essays represented throughout our online MCAT writing sample guide. The guide contains precise instructions on how to write a unified essay, with authentic MCAT sample essays.
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Consider this statement:
Education serves to restrict the human mind rather than to free it.
Write a unified essay in which you perform the following tasks. Explain what you think the above statement means. Describe a specific situation in which education might not restrict the human mind. Discuss what you think determines whether or not education restricts the human mind.
Sample Essay
Albert Einstein once said famously, "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education," and we know that Einstein, the greatest genius of the twentieth century, was a miserable failure in grade school. The notion that school learning serves only to limit the perimeter of human thought to that which has been thought before, is widespread. According to this belief, education is more like indoctrination: it inculcates the young with the facts, figures, ideas and beliefs of others and thereby forecloses the possibility of original thinking and hence, of really new knowledge. The mind of the young school child or the adolescent is daily conditioned by what constitutes knowledge in the first place—knowledge can only be math or science or history or reading but nothing that is not a school "subject"—and the content of thought as well as the way to think is dictated by teachers who simply give over the knowledge and ideas that others have had before. By the end of a young person's long journey through the halls of learning, their minds have been trained for so long to be passive receptacles of the thoughts of others that truly original and unique thinking—thinking out of the box, as we might say today—is practically impossible.
But it is not as if teachers and education experts do not know this. If there was a time when education meant simply learning as many facts and reading as many books as possible, today a high premium is placed on fostering creativity, imaginative acts, and original projects in the school child. A fascinating research project was carried out by a young teacher of the 6th grade, in which, after she had read a study claiming that there are many different types of intelligence in the child and not just the one traditionally measured by IQ tests, she decided to try and foster the development of six of these types of intelligence. For each topic the children were to learn—let us say the galaxy—she planned six different 20-minute lessons or activities, each addressing a different type of intelligence. So, for example, she had the students actually construct a model of a galaxy to foster their kinetic intelligence, or skills in physically moving and doing; the students would then write a poem or a song about an aspect of the galaxy to develop their musical intelligence; they would engage in a group project built on verbal communication and cooperation to develop their interpersonal intelligence, and so on. Careful testing done throughout the project showed that the students scored higher academically in every area. This method of teaching also fosters creativity, imagination, and individual initiative, and it gives plenty of room to the expression and development of differences between individuals. In other words, it recognizes the fact that the very uniqueness of each child, the fact that no two children will ever think exactly alike, is perhaps the most precious aspect of the child that education needs to foster and keep alive.
What then is the educator to do? Are we to continue to see the main task of education as the transmission from teacher to student of as much of the already known knowledge, facts, and ideas as possible, or are we to see the point of education as the encouragement of original thinking so that new knowledge, ideas, and understanding can be generated? The answer clearly is that education must do both. If the wisdom and the great works of the past are simply transmitted and learned by rote, then the student may "know" a lot but none of that knowledge will be of her own production. This kind of education, which was widespread in the past, emphasized memorization and rote learning. There was no discussion of ideas, no place for debate or for questioning authority, and certainly no opportunity for the creative production of original thought. But teaching the wisdom and the great works of the past does not necessarily restrict the mind; it illustrates what great minds have done and it thus points the way to similarly great but very different and new works of wisdom.
If the teacher challenges her class, for example, to write their own short story on, say, chronic dissatisfaction with one's life as patterned after Maupassant's well-known The Necklace, those school kids will have the best of both: the advantage of familiarity with the great achievements of the past and the challenge and opportunity to create unique new knowledge. |
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