Defining An Educated Person: What It Means To Be Educated

What it means to be educated as most things, evades a singular simple definition. One would find difficulty discerning a single meaning within a group of friends, let alone be able to find one within the many different cultural and social groups that exist. Without a static definition, in the spirit of having meaningful ways to describe language, one must then resort to searching for an effective definition. Over the past several weeks, having read countless articles to uncover just this, one in particular stood out as being especially discerning. I found Alfie Kohn’s “What does it mean to be educated?” originally posted Alfickohn.com in March 2003, to provide a unique perspective on the matter. Those insights are as follows:

In academia, education is defined and measured quantitatively through various exams and standardized testing. Students who test higher are considered to be more intelligent and more educated. However, as many people, including Kohn, criticize, these tests are a better measure of one’s ability to be tested rather than being a useful method of defining one’s aptitude. In this article, rather than attempt to define what it means to be well educated, he instead poses the question of the purpose of education and whether or not it has value to attempt to define it. The logic in question is as follows: Education leads to intelligence which leads to success which ultimately leads to happiness. However, exceptions can be made at any step within this chain. One can have intelligence without education and one can have success without intelligence.

Every student learns differently. They’ll learn at different paces, respond better to certain types of stimuli of the senses, and have varying levels of interest in different subjects. To say that there is only one way to educate is to suggest that everyone thinks the same. This argument, without need to rebuke, is untrue. For education to be an optimized process for the masses, resources must be available for students to pursue it through their own means. Like the language that we so intently tried to define earlier, instead of being prescriptive, education should instead be descriptive. “Rather than attempting to define what it means to be well educated, should we instead be asking about the purpose of education?” (Koch 2)

The debate is settled. Education is doomed to fail each and every student. Well, not exactly. By taking a general approach, modern academia seeks to gain a general insight into an individual’s general aptitude in general studies. However, this is hardly useful and according to Koch, shouldn’t be the basis for how we define intelligence or the path in which we embark our youth. A metric that fails to define the exact thing that it’s meant to be useless. “Does the phrase well-educated refer to a quality of the schooling you received, or to something about you?” (Koch 3)

The only thing that’s failed here is our obsession with quantifying the unquantifiable and defining something with a seemingly endless number of definitions. As Koch states, “Even assuming that you and I agree to include one criterion and exclude another, that doesn’t mean our definition should be imposed with the force of law-taking the form, for example, of requirements for a high school diploma” (Koch 6). There's no single definition that encompasses every aspect of a word like “educated.” Like most things, it's a gradient that evades simplicity. Its meaning and its function are context-sensitive. It depends not only on your personal biases but those of your peers as well, both reflecting certain cultural and historical points of view that continue to evolve along with language. Ultimately, the function of language will always be found in how it's used and not in the arbitrary, ever-changing box that we put it in.