October 7th, 2022 will remain a date forever engrained in my memory. I graduated from law school on this day making me the first lawyer in my family and the second university graduate in its history.
There were many such graduates on the day and there are many more in graduation squares all over the country and the world. We are, those who have benefited from the burden of the previous generation. A generation with no university degree, in some cases no formal education that raised university graduates.
This generational burden is visible on the faces of our parents. It is evident on their calloused feet, rough hands and insistence on their children’s academic excellence from a young age. It is a burden they have carried gracefully as they toiled away in their jobs to fund our education.
We stand on the shoulders of a courageous generation that dared to dream big and although they had no degrees guided us through out our academic journey, supported us and ensured through their hard work and prayer we went into the world as graduates in a better position than they were with more opportunities than they had.
Therefore, we are duty bound to serve the society we live in. To create a world where more like us can emerge and thrive. For humanity to move onwards it requires those who are privileged to look outwards. Indeed we are among the privileged for very few have university degrees in this country and so their opportunities are limited.
We must look outwards to those who bear the burden our parents once bore in a rapidly changing environment where the gaps of inequity get bigger by the day. It is our responsibility to ensure that their children have a shot at a better life. That their children just like us are made equal. As Horace Mann famously stated ‘’education, beyond all other devices of human origin is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.’’
I know this words to be true for I and many like me stand as equal to the children of professors and educated elites today. The opportunity that gives us to sit in rooms our parents had no shot of entering is telling of a generation unburdened.
INSIDER’S OUTLOOK 