Who is an Educated Person

Finished your education? What are you doing now ? This is what most of the people ask to get an idea about our position in life and education for them is a means for employment.For many people the importance of education lies in future job prospects, for others it's quality of citizenship, and others just want literacy, critical thinking, and/or creativity.

The definition of education guiding mainstream schools today is that education is the delivery of knowledge, skills, and information.While the metaphor—education as a delivery system—sounds reasonable, it misses what is most important about education.It should be an enlightening experience.It gives a person the abilities to think and execute things logically,rationally. Behind all the differences of opinion about what it means to be educated is one very basic idea: an educated person is someone who perceives accurately, thinks clearly, and acts effectively on self-selected goals.

Providing a proper definition of education is complicated by the fact that there is not a clear consensus about what is important about being and becoming educated.

Characterization of the educated person involves four essential ingredients, namely: knowledge, the ability to think, the ability to learn, and the ability to use language. In addition, the mental make-up of an educated person also includes relatively elusive qualities such as an awareness of the uncertainty and fallibility of knowledge, openness of mind, willingness and ability to doubt and question, personal involvement in knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and the joy of learning.

Ingredients of Educatedness

Knowledge

The most obvious ingredient of "educatedness" is knowledge.

When determining what goes into the background information of an educated person, it would be useful to distinguish between general knowledge and specialized knowledge. We expect a physicist to know that in the quark theory, the only elementary particles are quarks and leptons, but it is hardly necessary for a lawyer, doctor, or sociologist to have this information, and hence we would treat it as specialized knowledge. In contrast, we agree that the idea that matter consists of molecules and molecules consist of atoms is part of the general knowledge of any educated person in modern times.It is also important to bear in mind that what is regarded as knowledge keeps changing over time. The concept of the functional asymmetry of the left and right brains was not part of human knowledge in the seventeenth century, but today it is part of not only the knowledge of the specialist, but also the lay educated person. A few centuries ago, specialists and non-specialists alike believed that the sun revolves around the earth. We do not expect an educated person in modern times to subscribe to this belief. Even the division between specialized and general knowledge does not remain static. The concept of sensitivity-to-initial-conditions in chaos theory used to be part of specialized knowledge in the physical sciences, but it is fast becoming part of the general knowledge of educated people.

Finally, we must remember that even at a given time, general knowledge has both a universal component and a culture specific component. For instance, if a person who was born and brought up in India has no knowledge about Carnatic music and Hindustani music or monsoons, he/she would be regarded as lacking in education, but this would not apply to a person born and brought up in Australia. Similarly, one would expect an educated person in Singapore to be familiar with the history of Singapore, but there is no reason to expect this of an educated German. Granted that certain aspects of general knowledge are culture specific, we still need to acknowledge a core of universal ingredients of knowledge in the modern world. Twentieth century individuals who believe that a two day old human embryo has very small arms and legs have a gap in their education, independently of the culture they come from.

Based on this , we may formulate our first requirement of "educatedness" as follows:

An educated person should possess the general knowledge needed for making informed rational decisions and inferences on familiar and novel situations in personal and intellectual life.

The term "decisions" in the above statement covers decisions on what to do (i.e., pragmatic decisions) as well as decisions on what to believe (i.e., epistemic decisions). Also, the term "information" in this context applies not only to what are considered facts (e.g., matter expands when heated, things fall when dropped) but also to theories and theoretical interpretations (e.g., matter consists of molecules, expansion of heated matter is the result of the increased speed of molecular motion, things fall because of gravity).

The requirement articulated above may give the misleading impression that the information that an educated person should have is what is important for practical matters. Given that ideas about the expanding universe and the evolution of the species are not relevant for practical decisions in life, is it necessary for an educated person to be familiar with them?

The answer, which is a clear yes, calls for a distinction between foundational knowledge and non-foundational knowledge. The foundational knowledge, refers to leading ideas and metaphors of any discipline that have had far reaching consequences not only in transforming the whole discipline but also have transcended disciplinary boundaries to affect a wide range of human knowledge.

These ideas shape our perception of reality, yield metaphors for ordering and making sense of our experience, and guide further inquiry by influencing the questions we ask and the answers we provide, in a way that go beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines. When philosopher Thomas Kuhn talked about the paradigms that guide scientific inquiry, one of the concepts he was pointing to was that of the leading ideas that shape world views. In contrast, information about the chemical composition of common salt, the function of biceps and triceps in the action of the human arm, and the role of the limbic system of the brain in human emotions are matters of detail which do not qualify as foundational knowledge.

Given the centrality of foundational knowledge in shaping both the rest of human knowledge and further inquiry, it is important for educated people to have the foundational knowledge of their times, with an awareness of the evolution of this knowledge, as well as the evidence that justifies the belief in the foundational propositions