This is my rough draft for the Stanford Supplement essay prompt: Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality. Tell us about an idea or experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging. Please tear my essay to pieces [it's a draft afterall!] and give me your feedback! Thanks! [1799 characters, I barely made it!]
Throughout my educational experience, information has been fed to me as facts, numbers, and dates to be memorized for a test, then erased from my mind to make space for more facts. Our current institution defines this as "learning", although it involves no effort on my part besides tedious rote memory. However, Socrates once said, "true insight comes from within" and "education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel"; he believed that knowledge came from personal investigation, not from the words of a professor or the text on a page. Subsequently, I find Socratic Seminars intellectually engaging because they force the participants to ask questions and delve deep into themselves for answers, not rely on the opinions of others.
A particularly stimulating Socratic Seminar I participated in regarded the inevitability or preventability of war, and whether human nature incites the response of physical combat in society. Such an analytical prompt could not be answered by a learned fact, but required me to think critically about my perception of mankind. After the seminar, I came to the conclusion that man is inherently egotistical and therefore adamant that he is always right. This leads to verbal discord, since each man refuses to submit to compromise or defeat; if no resolution is reached, it will spiral into physical discord, since man possesses a carnal nature. I arrived at this admittedly subjective opinion after my interest was piqued, as Socrates would have predicted; nowhere could I have found my conclusion in a professor's lesson plan or a classroom textbook. Thus, Socratic Seminars are intellectually invigorating for they extend beyond the norm of conventional education, but require an active mind eager to gain insight through personal discovery.
i was trying to emphasize the importance of thinking for yourself rather than accepting what you're told from teachers and textbooks, but i agree that one's choices should be based on universally accepted facts. maybe i could try to make that clearer in the essay. other than that though, do you have any pointers on what i could edit?
the link you provided won't open... it says my "access is forbidden"...
The topic, as I said, is interesting. The negativity hurts you a bit.
After the seminar, I came to the conclusion that man is inherently egotistical and therefore adamant that he is always right.
This could easily be read as referring to all humankind, though you could also be using "man" as a gender specific word, I suppose. If the former, then you must be egotistical and stubborn yourself, or you could never have reached such a conclusion. If the latter, well, you can always hope that the admissions officers are all female. Either way, it hardly makes you a more attractive candidate for admissions.
I'd revise the essay to leave out the comparison of the seminar to classroom learning, and talk more in-depth about the positive effects the seminars had on you.
