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Education In David Foster Wallace's This Is Water

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Benjamin Franklin once said, “Some people die at 25 but are not buried till 75.” Franklin’s quote relates to This Is Water in the fact that David foster Wallace discusses ways on how to not die once a person has finished their schooling. The goal is how to wake up and realize that thought this day will be the same as the last it will differ based on how I wish to look at it; not as a boring old routine that countless people follow every day, but a means to an end. Towards one day waking up and realizing that the hard work has done something, retirement. The education people will or have received will teach them how to think, so that we realize not everything is as self-centered as people once believed it was. In the speech, David foster Wallace, discusses the real reason behind our education and what it can do for people as a whole. …show more content…

The first point he makes is that there are more sides to a story then the one we see. This is what our education is about, to teach us how to think rather than just slip into an automatic human with no freedom. He also states that our education was to teach us how to see other perspectives than our own, or as he says it “default setting.” This setting, according to Wallace, is the thought that, “I am the absolute center of the universe …there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of” (1). Life is boring, there will be times that we will not wat to wake up and go to work; but with the correct education, we can pull through and see things divergently, or moving away from what is expected of us, than normal. This education is to show us to think differently than what we automatically think, for us to remind ourselves that it may be us in the way of someone else; for if we can accomplish this, we will achieve true

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