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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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