An education is a survival tool, first and foremost. By being ‘educated’, you’ve learned valuable practical and theoretical life-skills to take from adolescence, as an educate, to an adult and educator to a new generational cycle. So when the ‘idea’ of an education gets summed up as a rolled up diploma, not getting it seems like a stab in the gut, and the concept of dropping out sounds like a nightmare scenario.

Through the completion of a full, free, American education, you see the doors of opportunity open before your eyes, free to put their potential you’ve built up during your life to that point into real action, all because you walked your high school’s graduation stage with a diploma in your hands, and a figurative halo above your head. The education within takes second place.

The idea that the one road, the only road to a fulfilling, successful life can be found within the light-weight of graduation robes is a common motif in schools. On the other end of this dichotomy rests the cold, unforgiving, brutality of a life without sufficient high school credits. The man who drops out is doomed the moment he’s stricken from the school attendance, forced to wander as lower-caste, or so it is told.

There exists an idea, a stereotype, that without a diploma one has disspent their education, made forfeit because of insouciance, and so too has their life become impossible. The truth is not so caliginous and grim. Rather it is a new road they walk, perhaps more rocky than its adjacent path, but not absolute and endless.

Yes, it is a fact that the road might be dimly lit, but it is the radiance of an ‘education’ that will make it livable. Those skills, theoretical and practical, will guide the wayward student where a diploma wont, and it will make the man’s life worth living.

In conclusion, High School Dropout, tough and hopeless are not synonymous. A show of this resolve I learned, at a live stand-up performance from the man himself, the $100,000,000. Net worth comedian Chris Rock can be an example to follow. Dropped out of high school, he had to live with a GED, in a time when opportunity was a more difficult thing to find, yet he used the skills he knew to make a life as one of America’s most famous comedians, because he had the will to. Keep the cards you’ve got close, and your ship surely won’t sink before your time.