Socrates would have loved Alfie Kohn’s approach to the question, “what does it mean to be well-educated?” Kohn rehearses all the definitions that one hears over and over again, and, cliché by cliché, shows them to be without form and void. One can almost hear the old philosopher cheering him on. In the final paragraph, Kohn reveals his answer: to be well-educated is to “…have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.” And here, in the view of this author, there is both more and less than one might hope. We discuss, first, the “more”, then the “less.” Kohn is absolutely correct in stating that a well-educated person should have come to understand that knowledge is fluid, that parts of it become obsolete, and that he key skill in a society that moves as fast as ours is knowing how to learn --- which is, one assumes, what he means by “the means”, as opposed to cash for tuition, room and board, and books. He is also correct in asserting that job skills alone cannot define the well-educated person. For one thing, they are dependent on the economy, and can vanish in a flash if an automated replacement was available. Before electronic computers, public accounting …show more content…
One can certainly dispute the idea that just knowing a set of facts and nothing else makes one well educated, but, as the “cultural literacy” movement tried to explain, badly, a “critical mass” of facts is necessary for the “chunking” part of the process of learning to kick in. It is impossible to form a theory about any area of life or knowledge without a critical mass of facts. One cannot see the deep connections between algebra and geometry without knowing at least some algebra and at least some geometry. Kohn, on the other hand, is right in saying that any assessment that tests only whether one has the facts, not what one can do with them, is missing the point. We will return to the assessment issue