Education, the key to the future,
A gift that lasts a lifetime,
Opening doors and minds to new ideas,
Helping us to reach for the stars and climb.
It’s not just about the grades we earn,
But about the things we learn and grow,
The skills and knowledge we acquire,
That help us to face the world and show.
Education helps us to think for ourselves,
To question and to explore,
To find our passions and our purpose,
And to open up a world of possibilities, more and more.
So let’s embrace education,
With all our hearts and minds,
For it is the key,
To a better future, one of a kind.
Appreciation
The poem, Key to the Future by Adetunji Faleye is a poem of four stanzas that has the theme of hope and possibilities. Right from the beginning of the poem, the poet opens the first stanza with Education, the key to the future, which represents hope. In the first stanza also, he accompanies ‘Education, the key to the future,’ with ‘A gift that lasts a lifetime’ having the power to Opening doors and minds to new ideas. That idea of possibilities stands for moving from hopelessness to a situation of abundant hope.
The second stanza goes further to explain that, that hope and possibilities are not as a result of our grades or what we earn in education, but what we learn and the skill and knowledge we acquire that will make us confident to face future challenges.
The poet in the third stanza says that education broadens our minds with the capacity to explore and find our passion.
So, he concludes that hope lies in education for anybody that embraces it for a brighter future.
The poet in his writing skill makes use of rhyme that makes the poem melodious.
A typical example of such rhyme can be found in stanza two i.e learn and ‘grow’; and world and ‘show’. ‘Grow’ and ‘show’ have the same rhyme.
It’s not just about the grades we earn,
But about the things we learn and grow,
The skills and knowledge we acquire,
That help us to face the world and show.
Also, we have it in ‘To question and to explore’ .. a world of possibilities, ‘more and more’ in stanza three of the poem where ‘explore’, ‘more’ and ‘more’ have the same rhyme style.
Education helps us to think for ourselves,
To question and to explore,
To find our passions and our purpose,
And to open up a world of possibilities, more and more.
It can also be found in the last stanza where the expressions ‘With all our hearts and minds’, and ‘To a better future, one of a kind’ create another rhyme through the words ‘minds’ and ‘kind.’
So let’s embrace education,
With all our hearts and minds,
For it is the key,
To a better future, one of a kind.
The poet also makes use of synecdoche when he uses ‘doors and minds’ to represent human beings in line three of stanza one of the poem.
He also makes use of alliteration, a combination of consonant sounds right next to each other, which creates a memorable or melodic effect. For instance,
To find our passions and our purpose,
And to open up a world of possibilities,
The use of more and more is a powerful repetition to lay emphasis on many things that we can derive from education.