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Essay On What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated

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“But he didn’t go to college..” When talking about what it means to be an educated person, the first thing that comes to most people’s mind is an individual who is the top of their class and graduates both high school and college with a 4.0. While in high school, the pressure to go to college is obscene, because now, the majority of Americans see a college education as an indicator of an intelligent, educated human being. In the article What Does it Mean to be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn, he argues that “to be well-educated.. is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends” (Kohn). Extending Kohn’s idea that intelligence cannot be defined, it can be contended that an educated person is someone who has received …show more content…

Consequently, this idea is spread throughout society encouraging these behaviors and constituting the beliefs that now surround what it means to be educated. However, this practice is ineffective because, as Talia Felker states in her education mini-assignment, “a teacher cannot just insert endless amounts of information inside of a student’s head and expect he or she to be able to access all of this information perfectly.” Students can only retain so much information for so long. Although the majority of modern day students are continuing their education in college, what percentage of these students are actually learning and how can their intelligence be assessed? Can they be considered an ‘educated’ individual simply because they graduated college? As a result of the methods being used in most classrooms, students are graduating from college with little general knowledge. This idea is explained in the article Learning to Learn, stating that “several recent studies have shown that many college seniors have neither good general knowledge nor the necessary skills for reasoning in today’s society” (Werth, Perkins). Dissimilar to the popular beliefs surrounding intelligence, the true meaning of education is the “journey to self realization”

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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.

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If a person’s parent or guardian drilled the idea of college into your head, or if they told you ‘do what you want’ or ‘I don 't care’, or ‘You’re not going’. While college is great, there are other means of education. The value of college is a low because there are people who do not qualify for a college education, and also because there are other ways of post-secondary education other than college. College is not valuable because many people will not make it into a 2 or 4-year college, much less graduate from one. To support this, in the article Why College Isn 't For Everyone, it says, “As a general rule, I would use graduates in the top quarter of their class at a high-quality high school should go on to a four-year degree program, while those in the bottom quarter of their classes at a high school with a mediocre educational reputation should not.”

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In the article “ Why college isn’t( and shouldn’t have to be) for everybody” it states “For example, the emerging economy will need platoons of technicians able to install, service, and repair all the high-tech machinery filling up hospitals, offices, and factories.”(26) . “ Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” They feel they are compelled to get a college degree because they’ve been told that it was necessary to get a college degree, some people also think that if you go to a four-year college everyone would look down to their nose if they don’t have a college degree.. “ I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver.

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