The Meaning of Being Educated
Education is an ancient topic aging back to before the Dark Ages as people sought to improve their knowledge to lead a better life. From the very start of most civilizations, people had to learn rules, customs, and specialized skills like pottery or woodwork to help them survive. Through the centuries, education has increased into studying many fields to improve the quality of life in a society, leading it to take on an even more important role.
What is the Purpose of Education?
Not only does education aid us in getting jobs and making money but it also allows the world to run more smoothly in general. People at least need to know the rules and rights they have as citizens and basic skills such as counting and spelling or else there would be chaos. In the same way, people must learn specialized skills so that they can contribute to the economy and society in positive ways. A modern society needs doctors, engineers, and all types of jobs that require certain training to help the world run smoothly. Also, with education and through the exploration of science, we have created technology like vaccines to eliminate once deadly diseases. This science and innovation that also helped in building convenient machines like smart phones, was made possible due to individual’s excessive education.
When the United States first achieved freedom and sought democracy, schools were still uncommon in most places. But in order to have a successful democracy and allow the average citizen to participate in politics, as the new government system required, people needed to become educated. To fix this, the Republican Motherhood was made, tasking mothers with teaching their children about politics and democracy, so that one day they would be able to vote. Later on, public schools were formed to allow more of an equal chance for everyone to be educated and participate positively in our government. The importance of education is strong under any government system because if citizens are not taught about what rights they have then it would be easy for them to be exploited and abused by the government, law, and other citizens, leading to less peace.
Where Should This Learning Be Done?
In some ways a school can be a good place for this learning to occur because it offers instruction from teachers and textbooks to lead people through what could be a difficult concept to understand. However, it can also be an extremely harmful environment that takes away from learning by putting stress on grades over the actual education. In school, good grades do not necessarily equate to good learning. A student will often sacrifice true learning in order to earn better grades by researching topics they already know about instead of trying to learn new things, or memorize material for tests instead of actually learning the content. Deadlines also do this because they lead students to choose “easier” projects out of fear that they won’t have the time to finish if they choose something they are actually interested in learning. This is specifically seen when students choose the shortest book offered to them simply because it is the shortest. Luckily, the internet and libraries help by allowing people access to continue learning outside of schools, so even if schools are failing, education isn’t far out of reach.
However, while learning things on their own or with the influence of others who also do not have a good understanding of the topic, people can fall into misinformation. Having the wrong information is just as bad, if not worse, than having no information at all because it causes people to choose sides prematurely and takes away the possibility of future learning, causing more problems in society. To fix this, people need to be encouraged to thoroughly research topics and look for unbiased sources before taking sides on a topic. Luckily, an easy solution is to reform schools, which would allow these skills to be taught and give more of a guided learning experience to people early on, leading to a better education overall.
So What Does it Mean to Be Educated?
According to the purpose education serves, to be educated would be when you are able to contribute to society, know your rights, and have enough of an understanding of the government to make educated votes that will help the society. However, this doesn’t seem to be completely true because there will always be topics that you cannot be considered educated in even when knowledge of them could also help serve the purpose of creating a peaceful environment. So perhaps you can never be completely educated and instead can only be educated on certain topics. Which would mean that being educated on something means you know and understand all facts about a certain topic.
However, another important thing education does is that it helps us to understand other cultures, social issues, and other problems we may not personally suffer. By gaining an understanding of these, people can work to finding a solution to serious world problems. Without an understanding of these things, people are more likely to harm each other through misunderstandings. Fear frequently comes from a lack of understanding and often brings chaos, so if a person is uneducated on social issues, especially ones that don’t affect them, then they will be more likely to react in a hostile way towards the topic. The consequences of misinformation are severe, such as the tensions against Muslims today. Since most people don’t understand or have a vast knowledge of the religion, they generalize and assume that the religion itself is violent. This has created a dangerous stigma against Muslims that is overall harmful to everyone and has led to further conflict.
But even when thoroughly studying these different cultures and problems, without having any firsthand experience with it, it is impossible to ever truly understand it completely and wholly. So since this is such a large part of education, it seems wrong to define being educated as completely understanding a topic because then it would be nearly impossible to master a variety of topics, let alone a single one. Therefore leading a better definition of what it mean to be educated to be, when you have gained enough knowledge to understand a specific social issue as well as you possibly can from all points of view, have a near full understanding of factual topics, and know your rights and enough about the government to positively participate in society.
Why Does Proper Education Matter?
Overall, with so many aspects going into it, education is not something that can be easily defined. Today, education in a school system is not a choice, but within the system students are offered different possibilities where they may not get to choose whether or not to be enrolled in school, but they do get to choose what they get out of it. If students view school as an opportunity to learn then they will have a better chance at becoming educated.
Along with this, education goes beyond just learning because in order for anyone to learn, everyone must teach each other their own perspective and knowledge of it. Everyday in ordinary conversations people exchange new information to each other that allows them to both gain a better understanding of countless topics. Whether it is seemingly useless facts or a new enlightening perspective of something, we are always learning and always teaching, spreading information with everywhere we go. While we still have a long way to go in improving many aspects of education, this cycle of knowledge has led our society to improve drastically throughout the years. As we as a society become more and more educated, perhaps one day we will accomplish things like new innovation and social change that as of now seem impossible.
