For as long as I have lived, education meant learning from what has already been done – existing knowledge and past discoveries. For a while, I even thought that learning simply meant memorizing the list of facts written into a textbook by a person to whom we’d never even give a second thought. I was labeled as "intelligent" simply because I had perfectly memorized the knowledge that scholars have shared with us. Being thought as intelligent to other people should feel like a rare compliment, but how does one go about calling another intelligent simply due to the extent of facts they have in their heads? This concept never seemed right to me. I could never place my finger on the reason why; but that changed after I read the "American Scholar." The "American Scholar" was a speech written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, lecturer, and poet in the 1800s, to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837 to encourage the scholars of his nation to go beyond the conventional archetypes of learning. Emerson’s ideas are still very prevalent in today’s education system; hence, I will be discussing the ideas of past learning and developing self-trust, how those ideas are related to certain aspects of my life, and how it could assist me in my progress towards being a better student. Emerson has pointed out a multitude of great ideas, but the ones that I find particularly profound are past learning and developing self-trust. According to Emerson, books, or in a more general notion, the past, could potentially pose as a threat to scholars. He stated, “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system” (Emerson 4). I found this idea extremely significant because it is something of which most of us are guilty. We enjoy learning, we enjoy reading, but how often do we actually process the information that our minds receive? How often do we question the content of what has been readily given to us? The vast majority of the world is guilty of being trapped in a monotonous cycle of accepting new information, but never giving. The possibility of a new di