Throughout the commencement speech “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace, Wallace discusses the importance of education and how it genuinely affects one’s adult life. He introduces the idea that education allows you to be aware of your surroundings. He goes on to discuss a story about two fish swimming by when an older fish swims past them and asks how the water is. One of the smaller fish then asks what water is. Wallace claims “the point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” (Wallace 2). Education, especially in high school truly is beneficial to your adult years as it allows you to think in a more critical and abstract way. Wallace states, “a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think””(Wallace 2). Within this statement, you learn how to think, but most importantly you have the choice of what to think about. This allows your education to reflect how you thik and the choices you will make later in the future. Lastly, Wallace hints at the idea of empathy and that you have the choice to choose what you think about, and you can become an empath with this choice. Later in the article he says, “… you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it”(Wallace 6). He gave the idea that someone could be having a worse day than you, but because you are the center of all your experiences and realities you learn to prioritize yourself. Within education, you can learn to make the choice to put others in front of you and ultimately you get to decide your own reality.

I do not agree with Wallace’s main arguments, but I can understand the point he is trying to make. I believe that his argument that education allows you to learn how to think and allows one to create their own reality and make their own choices, but I also believe there is more to education and that other aspects of life csn filter into education, for example shared experience. Experience cannot be taught, but instead is learned through making mistakes and then learning from those mistakes. Education does teach one how to think for themselves, but is education all about making choices within life? The ability to choose what you think of, in my opinion, is not what education is, it cannot be learned, but is a reflection of your surroundings and past experiences that have shaped the way you think.

Although Wallace does not use the word empathy at all within his speech, I believe to an extent that he is hinting at empathy. He uses examples within his speech as other people being in more of a rush than he is and giving them excuses as to why they are having bad days and how this reflects his attitude towards them and his surroundings. I do think that this idea hints at empathy, but I believe there can be a deeper meaning than his entire speech being about how we have the choice to be an empath. I believe if he wanted to hint at the idea of empathy he would have just used the word empathy to get the point across rather than going through roundabout ways to understand the idea. If he is hinting at empathy, I believe the majority of his essay is about the affects of education rather than empathy, although he does relate empathy as an effect of education, it is not the major focal point of the speech.

Wallace creates the idea that learning how to think allows you to learn how to make choices. He claims, “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and choose how you construct meaning from experience” (Wallace 4). I agree with this statement that the more you learn the easier it is to filter out what is important and what is not. You can create that choice by learning through experience and learning from those mistakes and the ability to think for yourself and your surroundings.