A world where education is a right, not a privilege

I grew up in Sweden, a country where education is free from primary to academic level. Still, growing up in a working-class family, I never felt like academia was something that I was entitled to. After upper-secondary school, I got a job at a non-profit organisation called ‘A Non Smoking Generation’ that opened up my world to learning. I have always been a big opponent of smoking, mainly due to the fact that my grandmother died from smoking-related diseases. I had visited several chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer wards as a kid, and a wish of mine has always been to eradicate tobacco from this world.
My job was to inspire and talk to children and adolescents about tobacco and health, but also on how tobacco companies operate to lure people into life-long dependencies. It gave me the opportunity to travel to Malawi, to learn from farmers how dangerous and hazardous it is to work with tobacco production. As my knowledge grew, so did my passion and engagement in global health and development. My world had opened up to so many injustices that I just could not ignore. I knew that if I wanted to work with these issues I had to learn, to be able to take action. I became the first one in my family to study at university level and all of a sudden, I had spent several years in a world where I didn’t think I belonged. Even though education at university level always had been available, it was not mentally accessible to me. Being a first-generation university student, I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome, the unjustified feeling of being someone undeserving of their accomplishments. Despite this, my values of equal rights to education and health are what got me through it, it gave me a feeling of direction and purposefulness to keep going. That is why my dream is that quality education should be for everyone, no one should be or feel more entitled to it than anyone else. I want a world where health and education are seen not as a privilege, but a right. A world where our access to education is not merely decided on our economic capabilities and social circumstances. For my part, education has changed the path of my life. and I’m so happy that I took the chance.