What does it mean to learn?

I was born into a working-class family. My mom could only complete up to the  ninth grade, and my father could only study until the fourth grade. In Portugal, they  didn’t use to finish high school until not so long ago. Keeping the poor uneducated  is one of the best ways to make sure they stay poor — and you stay rich. 

I’m the first generation in my family who could finish high school and even go to  college, if I wanted and worked for it. Education is a privilege, and my parents  made sure I knew it. 

For a time, being smart felt like memorizing. Memorizing topics for an exam, for  a presentation, for the sake of showing my family what I’d learned. But I never  actually learned anything. I just memorized something so that I could forget it next  week — and then memorize something new. 

I stopped memorizing in eighth grade. The modern conflicts in Eastern Europe led  to a big wave of migration to Portugal — or at least to the town where I lived. I  had the pleasure of having a Russian boy in my class. Since I was the one with the  best English in the class, I was asked to help him. I accepted, and we bonded  easily. 

After some weeks interacting with him and his friends, I decided to learn Russian.  I got curious about what this culture and language could bring me. I had already  tried to learn other languages before, but it always felt like an impossible task to  memorize everything. But after some months of studying, I finally started learning  — not memorizing. I used to practice as much Russian as I could at school, and  then I’d come home to study and learn even more. I was furnishing my brain  instead of decorating it. 

Learning new languages — Russian at that time — was my new passion. In a year  and a half, I could already speak freely. That was all thanks to the globalization  and democratization of education — phone apps and daily use of the language  were my key pieces. 

But even after learning so much, I couldn’t just go back to memorizing — I had to  keep learning. I got passionate about everything at some point — History,  Geography, Politics, Literature, Philosophy — but my main hobby, in which I learn the most, is still language learning. I’m now going into the tenth grade, and I  can also speak French and Italian. 

I hope to go to college to study International Relations or Law later, when I finish  high school. 

Since I’ve started learning languages, I’ve heard multiple times: “Why would you learn that?  It’s a useless topic. You’re never going to do anything with it!” To those people, I  hope one day they also start learning instead of memorizing — because to learn is  the best way to see the world. Being educated helps you see, even when someone  is trying to blind you, and we should never let someone make us blind.  Now I believe one of my biggest purposes in life is to learn more every day. I want  to be as educated, curious and aware as a person can be. There is no possible limit on what I can fit into my brain if I keep learning, not memorizing.