What a Chinese New Zealander High Schooler Can Do (Full Text of the Winning Essay)
This past year, a Chinese student from New Zealand won the College Board & The Atlantic’s Essay Writing Contest.
This year’s winner, selected by a panel of College Board and Atlantic staff, [was] Nicolas Yan, a Year 13 student at King’s College, an independent secondary school in Auckland, New Zealand. His essay – on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech – stood out as a successful demonstration of analytical writing.
For our great students at SanLi, we thought it would be a great model to try and emulate.
The full text of his essay appeared in the Atlantic here:
Reading MLK in New Zealand
More than 50 years later, the Southern Baptist preacher’s words resonate—even outside of America.
More than 50 years after its delivery, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous refrain of “I have a dream” remains a cry for freedom that has been adopted by activists the world over, from Tiananmen Square to the West Bank. But in order to fully appreciate the magnitude of King’s 1963 speech at the March on Washington, we must first understand the context of its delivery. King spoke of an America whose black population was “sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”