What Does It Mean To Be Well-Educated

Aristotle said, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” What does it really mean to be educated? Many people thought that they knew what education meant, even I felt confident in myself to define education. However, the ideas discussed in class really made me question my definition of education. My definition has changed within the past few weeks as I discovered more about education. I am here to present my definition of education; with the lack of resources, one can still become educated by learning the unknown and putting your knowledge to good use.

What does it mean to be well-educated? Is a well-educated person someone who went to a good school? Does it apply to someone who got straight A’s is school and did well on standardized tests? Does it mean that they are smart or just good at memorizing their material and requirements for tests? If they are good at passing test by memorizing all the material but then forget it as soon as the test is done then what good was taking a test in the first place? Is a well-educated person the same thing as a smart person? If a person went to an adequate school and receives a good education then it would be concluded that they are well-educated but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are smart. It might just mean

Yet even with these realizations that delve into the deeper meaning of education, modern education is still calling for simple measurable outcomes and continues to be geared towards specific employment ideas. This model of education is blatantly inadequate though. Many students today will end up holding jobs not yet invented in fields not yet discovered, so the teaching of answers to today’s questions is utterly useless. Albert Einstein once said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” and this statement reigns true throughout time. To continue academic success, the education system needs to impart a mastery of one’s own mind that allows students to not only answer current questions but also to pose questions that will shape the future world.

Some people might like education, others might dread it and really don’t see a reason to continue learning about it. Today, for teachers and professors it’s easy to them to tell how the education they teach is effective for an individual student. As we know, education is being taught at school, home, and a little of both. For America today, most children attend preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle school, high school, and college. Depending on the pupil's career choice, it can take up to 20 or more years completing their schooling system, Usually, during the middle and or high school years in America, professors teach you valid things pupils will be using in life.

Education is the gradual process of meaning making and acquiring “knowledge.” One views the world through his or her own set of lenses or filters, from his or her own perspective, and the mind of the learner attempts to connect new information to existing schema to make new connections. These constructions and connections in the brain become "knowledge." Therefore, knowledge when people begin to understand facts or information through experience and/or learning. We begin to realize, through knowledge, details that we learn in isolation are actually interconnected. Education can be intentional or unintentional and can occur everywhere and at any time. Education is greatly influenced by affective factors and social context. It has both internal and external value, both to a person and to all of society.

What is education? Two words probably jump out at most people: learning and school. Yet, how much students are actually learning must be analyzed because passing through is not the same thing as experiencing. In the same case learning is the same thing as receiving information and moving on. Even so, schools are blindly addressing the two as the same thing because secondary institutions have compressed education into numbers that signify intelligence. However, when education and school become two entities, children are not able to reach their full potential which then leads to them being unhappy in life as an adult.

In America education is becoming more competitive: Nursing, Business, Makeup Artist, Choreographers in this fields it’s getting harder to find jobs. In this competitive fields colleague graduates are force to be constantly aware of what everyone is doing. Students invest their time, dedication, money in education for a better financial future and feel the pride that a person did well in life. As a person reads throughout the essay a person will be learning about the role of education in society and individuals’ lives.

In his essay “What Does It Mean To Be Well-Educated,” Alfie Kohn challenges the current standards that people consider crucial in order for a person to be considered well-educated and explores some interesting questions that help provide the reader with a completely different understanding of education. At the beginning, Kohn explains how people can argue about the purpose of education, but then fail to realize and recognize whether or not education has truly been successful. Then, Kohn provides the reader with an example of his wife, a successful physician who completed her study for a doctoral dissertation in anthropology at Harvard, yet still lacks some educational basics that people consider necessary factors to possess in order for a person to fit in the defined (fit the definition of well-educated) group of well-educated individuals (Kohn 231-232). After that, Kohn explores some definitions that people set as essential measurements for determining whether or not a person is well-educated and explains why all these standard definitions fail to either evaluate a person’s knowledge or make a person knowledgeable. For example, many people consider test scores, seat time, job skills, and memorization of facts as indicators of well-education. However, Kohn explains that sitting in class for a certain amount of time, “reducing schooling to vocational preparation…to suit the demands of employers,”

For a country that places such a huge emphasis on being educated, it is incomprehensible for some to imagine why so many people take accessible education for granted. Many have the idea that this is due to people having become lazy over time. I, however, believe that this disinterest in education is due primarily to the singular way in which everyone is expected to learn. Education is formally defined as, “the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university” (“Education” def. 1). To have education is to acquire information in a way that follows structured procedure. One flaw in following this definition exclusively is that it fails to acknowledge other ways in which a person can learn effectively.

What do students obtain through education? Freire in his essay ‘The Banking Concept of Education’ argues that students gain useless and meaningless knowledge through education, and I agree with Freire because education has become an act of depositing meaningless information into students. Freire believes the current educational system is flawed due to the “Banking Concept”, which Freire describes as, “an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor”(Freire 72). Freire implies that teachers are only telling students what to know rather than conversting with them, which explains why Freire insists that “education is suffering from narration

Education is an activity we all feel that we know something about, having had personal and direct experience of it. Education has become a large industry employing many hundreds of thousands of people in Britain alone. It is supposedly an important part of ensuring future economic development yet it also imposes a major financial cost. Education plays a central role in society and also in all of our lives. So education is a very complex set of

Ask any highschool student what the powerhouse of the cell is, they’ll reply “Mitochondria,” without processing the question. Ask what slope intercept form is… “y=mx+b”. High Schoolers will be able to tell you the precise structure of an atom, or the names of all three ships Columbus sailed on in his exploration. Ask them why they have a social security number? What a credit score is? Or, how do you do taxes or apply for a loan? And they will stare at you in a blind gaze. If we take a step back and think of what we really learned in four years of high school… what does it amount to? What does a good education look like? Why are we questioned what number/percentage we received instead of what did we learn? Education today prioritizes what scores we receive instead of what we have actually taken away from the work, and fails to provide us with the most basic life skills that we need to succeed.

Education is not to teach children how to learn; no, it is to make factory workers. Students are expected to memorize facts the teacher narrates and recite them back later for an exam, quiz, or

Education is not just the amount of information that is put into a child’s brain undigested, unrelated an unassimilated. The very essence of education is the concentration of mind and

Through the long history,educators,thinkers,politicians and scholars have answered the question of what education is in different ways: some see it from the perspective of educational value,some see it from the perspective of educational purposes,some see it from the perspective of educational content and methods,and some see it from the