Summer vacation is approximately three months given to students at the end of the two-semester education period. During this period, students do not come to school and are just assigned some homework. Students who see a few pages of homework as too much for these three months complain and leave it all to the last day. On days when they are not doing homework, they either play video games, spend a day watching movies incessantly or spend their entire vacation sitting in cafes with their friends. However, summer vacation is such a good time and opportunity to continue studying.
Contrary to what we all think, learning is not something you do just at school. You can learn from what you see while walking to the grocery store, you can even learn from the argument you overhear while you are on the subway, not to mention what you can learn if you open a book you have that has been sitting at home for ages. As you can see, there is a lot you can learn if you want to learn. In fact, the more you learn, the more you realize all the things you haven’t learned yet. As we all know, “The eternity of learning shows how little one knows.” But the three-month vacation given to students opens the doors of a great opportunity: You can travel! You can go to the museum that your mother always talks about but you always postpone, you can go to Kızılcahamam to see the streets where your grandmother grew up, you can go to Istanbul for a few days and get lost in the streets, you can smell the smell of history…
Unless, of course, you want to spend the whole summer wandering the beaches. I’m not saying don’t upset foot on the beach, bury your head in books, or stay out of museums; because when you lie on the beach and get lost in your thoughts, you may not learn what you will learn about yourself while reading a book, but you can learn and explore yourself whenever you want, however, you only have three months to travel as much as you can. Three quarters of a year is spent being told what to do. It’s an opportunity for you to wear that skirt despite the aunt who tells you that your skirt is short, an opportunity for you to go out all day despite the uncle who says a true lady stays in her house, an opportunity to shout in their faces that you are free to do whatever you want. You have a huge opportunity to do everything you’ve been told you can’t do.
The greatest prison is inside the head of an ignorant person. I think anyone who doesn’t open the cover of a book every day is slowly laying the bricks of their own prison on top of each other. Just as a prison is not built in a day, you cannot become ignorant in a day. You may think you know too much right now, but with so much to learn, aren’t we actually always kind of ignorant? In fact, a set of bricks has always surrounded us since we were born. You can remove these bricks by reading and travelling, or you can continue to add to the existing bricks.