What Does It Mean To Be Truly Educated?
In the beginning of my junior year, I was faced with the question: “What is the purpose of education?” I spent most of my time thinking and writing about all the things school did wrong. Schools can promote unhealthy competition, cheating, and laziness. At the time, I believed I was fully answering the question. Now, at the end of my junior year, I am faced with this new question: “What does it mean to be truly educated?”
While I first dismissed generic answers such as “getting good SAT scores,” or “going to school,” or “doing homework,” I couldn’t quite pinpoint the definition of someone who is “well-educated.” I don’t have to know calculus or a second language to be educated, nor do I have to go to university and get a degree to be educated, but that also doesn’t mean I am not educated either.
Education should not be confused with school. Education teaches children how to become contributing members of their society. A school is an environment where you go to get an education after you are forced to wake up at unorthodox hours with people you are categorically similar to. Although in today’s age getting a formal education may mean going to school, a true education can also be achieved outside school walls. The quality or quantity of your schooling may not always translate to the quality of your education.
While education and school are different, the intention of going to school should be to receive an education. Though standardized tests may say otherwise, having an education is not merely knowing information. I have spent hours pouring over textbooks full of biology terms and names of historical figures, to forget them after the exam because they are not applicable to my everyday life. Anyone can pick up a textbook and memorize it, but without any intent to use the content or to practice a skill, nothing is really learned. Familiarity with a list of words, names, books, and ideas is a poor way to judge who is well-educated. There are actions that characterize someone who is truly educated, such as thinking critically, questioning why and how things are, and engaging with others in meaningful communication.
An educated person is prepared to listen to new ideas contrary to their own. Skills such as reasoning, analyzing, and imagining creatively should be nurtured when getting an education. Being individuals, learning to maintain an intellectual curiosity for different fields of study, students are allowed to make their own decisions as they get older to better society. However, having an education is not just being prepared for the workforce, it is about being a member of a democratic republic in this country. How would a democracy be able to survive if students were all trained to think and act alike? Schools that give their students a true education do not standardize their students and expect students to meet all requirements for graduation in the same way. Adopting the same standards, pushing for high performances on tests, and trying to invent common teaching practices that increase test scores will never be successful preparation for the real world. There is no magic number that can determine the extent of a student’s skills, no set list of skills you necessarily have to have to succeed in life.
As I was writing this, I realized the questions of what the purpose of education is and what it truly means to be educated have the same answer. Across cultures, philosophers, and writers have responded to these questions in very different ways. It is impossible to agree on one definition of education, and there is no one person who gets to decide. Talking about the meaning of education ultimately leads to our interpretation of what society considers most important, and the criteria for someone who is well educated will change throughout every job, school, culture, and even time. My interpretation, in our free society today, is that being truly educated and the point of education is to have the ability to learn and show our ideas, innovations, and reasoning to be prepared for the real world.
