Raven Leggett of Eureka Springs earned the top score – let’s repeat that – First Place on the General Educational Development (GED) exam in 2018, the Arkansas Department of Career Education Adult Education Division announced Friday. Thirty-five hundred people took the test and passed.
Raven’s early Tuesday morning words regarding education: “I think the most important advice I’d give to someone looking to further their education (GED, traditional high school, college, etc.) would be to re-think how you view education. I think a lot of us are indoctrinated to go with the idea that education is a means to an end. That math sucks and education is a chore. I’ve never found that mindset productive and I’ve never found it to be true. If you can change that mindset to one of enjoyment rather than chore, passion follows suit.
“Education is empowering and we live in an age with more accessibility to it than ever, but this also brings misuse. It makes it easy to sit in an eternal echo chamber of the thoughts and values we already project, it makes it easy to fall for pseudoscience when you haven’t learned the nuance of thinking critically and being scientifically literate, it acts as a security to your pre-conceived beliefs which allow you to never look at them in a constructive way.
“People spend a majority of their days connected to this overwhelming collection of information and misinformation, but navigating it responsibly is a skill that has fallen under the radar. We let algorithms decide what it is we will see and then have no want to question anything.
“I think if I had to choose one piece of advice it would be to start questioning more and understanding what a sufficient answer looks like. Learn to enjoy learning for learning’s sake. Find interests and feed them through knowledge. I know it can be easier to fall into the cycle of idly scrolling, that the images and noises of our day-to-day use can act as a state of being comfortably numb in an emotionally taxing world. But leaving the sound on because silence is harder will never be as fulfilling as using what we have to do better for ourselves and the rest of the world.”