He who opens a school door closes a prison

Posted on October 28, 2018 by the Editor

By Nsiah Sandra Owusua. Sandra, 19, is a high school graduate from Accra, Ghana. Please read her article and leave your thoughts and comments below.

Professional education, they say, is the key to success. Education helps an individual acquire knowledge, understand and skill in order to be meaningful to society.

In Victor Hugo’s novel, he used ‘The school’ to symbolize education and ‘The prison’ to symbolize the effect of not being educated.

In Victor Hugo’s novel,”he who opens a school door closes a prison” does not literally mean a real prison. Victor Hugo was trying to say that education is the key to get to anywhere in life. Victor Hugo means that when a person gets educated, he or she breaks some boundaries in life. These are the following:

Education helps to break out of the cycle of minimum wage jobs which can be like a prison. When an individual gets to be educated, the person become very successful in life. This success brings many good things and their life changes for the better. The successful person gets to live a luxurious life. He or she gets a better place to live, can drive the cars of his or her choice and can generally live a good and healthy life.

But the person who is not educated misses great things in life. Nobody can know everything but perhaps, there are basic things that most people presume everyone knows. For instance, some people do not know some basic things like reading, solving mathematical problems and even solving simple challenges in their everyday life. Anyone who does not know that things is assumed to be in a prison his or her making. This people have made their own prisons which I call a forever prison because they do not know the basic knowledge one needs for everyday life, and will be forever cut off from enjoying a lot of what life has to offer as the educated successful persons get.

Again, the prison in the phrase can be related to the limitations caused by education to the uneducated. A person who is uneducated can not be given a high position in the nation because it is assumed that the person does not have knowledge to carry such position. I will not elect a person who is not educated to be a secretary in my company because I believe that person can not read and write. So much more so with a nation. One can have the skill but educating that person will help polish his or her skill to become more classy. Educated people can hold any positions of their choice because they are capable and competent to hold such positions.

Assuming Donald Trump wasn’t educated, will the United States have voted for him?

To continue, education has made people more famous and well respected and has closed the prison in their life. Education has made Nelson Mandela, Jeff Bezos, Alibaba well famous and respected because they have used the knowledge they got through education to make good things in life.

Lastly, education has closed a prison in the sector of health. Even though there were herbalists and they cured disease, they were not able to know the quantity of medicine to give to a sick person. I think if these herbalists got education, they would have got more knowledge on herbs. The lack of education these herbalists did not get has left them in ‘prison’. Education has made people have knowledge in health and have come out with easy ways of diagnosing a disease and treating them. Now we have different ways of curing diseases. We have the naturopathy that is treating diseases by diet control, exercise and massage, homeopathy and the amazing way of treating diseases by using specialised light to cure diseases which is ‘phototherapy’. Is this not wonderful?

I fully agree with the phrase that ‘He who opens a school door closes a prison’.

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59 comments on “He who opens a school door closes a prison”

  36. Eugene Mario on

    I find it not interested cause I don’t like reading ……but as I read the first – three paragraphs… I find it interesting and educative…. Thanks a lot

    Reply

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