What Does It Mean To Be Educated?

The American publisher, Malcolm S. Forbes once said, “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one,” and in saying this he demonstrated to the world a whole new way to look at education. For years, our society and others around the globe for that matter have used education as a kind of tyrannical form of learning. Teachers have taught for centuries, but the best teachers have always learned just as much as they’ve taught, especially from their students. An education is a bargaining tool like no other in this world and for that matter, being educated places you a pedestal, intellectually above those who have received no education. To be educated means that you are aware of the ideas around you and understand them and like Forbes said, to open your mind to a world that we have yet to learn anything about.

Our world is becoming so vast that the more we learn and the more we are educated, it seems the less we know, it seems the less our education means. That is why being educated does not just mean that you have a high school diploma or a college degree; being educated means that you never stop learning and that you never want to. It is that constant fight to learn new information and to place ourselves higher and higher on our own pedestals in order to see above the masses and grasp more and more information, adding it to our hopefully open minds, thanks to the education we’ve received thus far.

I have been educated; I have learned what I’ve needed to learn to get to this point in my intellectual journey. However, there have definitely been holes in my education and places where I have not been taught, but rather taught at, such as the “banking approach” often used by teachers, that Paulo Freire speaks of in his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Those teachers were the ones that thought they didn’t need to learn anything more than they already knew, though their ignorance showed through even more by that belief. In my experience, the teachers that have taught me the most and that have meant the most to me were the ones that knew they had so much more to learn. These are people that I respect, that are teachers in the true sense of the word and “teachers” of life, people that have taught me so many important lessons through my years.

An education is based on the knowledge that we learn and are supposed to learn. That knowledge can often be learned through the experiences of ourselves and others, it does not necessarily need to be “taught” to us. For myself, my education has always been the highest priority; it has been something that I know takes a lot of work, but that in the end, is worth more than any class I’ve ever sat through. There are of course, many classes that will be worthwhile in our lives and in our education, though to be educated, I believe we have to go beyond that and search out questions for ourselves that we will someday learn the answers to.

Honestly I don’t know if a person can ever be truly “educated” in everything. Education is something that is a lifelong process and that spans over years and years of learning. My education started when I was very young, such as many others that I know, and only kept growing as I got older. My education is sill building and is no where near finished at this point in my life. To be educated sounds much simpler of a concept than it truly is in reality and often it is thought to be so.

I have to agree with Forbes when he said that the purpose of education is to broaden the horizons, to branch out from what people take for granted each and every day. Our education system in this country, in my opinion, needs more of a proactive approach with teachers and students learning from each other and broadening their own knowledge in the process such as the “problem posing educators” that Freire discusses. An education is perhaps one of the most important possessions we can ever hold and it is something that no one can ever take away. Though to be educated is an entirely different matter and though in ways the two connect, being educated means realizing that the world is full of knowledge and that we may never know it all. It means that we have to keep searching for more answers and acknowledge our ignorance on some topics, that we have to constantly want to find out more about things that interest us, and it means that we have to know that in the space and time of all the knowledge in this world, we know hardly anything at all.

We can never stop learning and to be educated, that is the first step you have to accept. As Forbes said, “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one,” we should learn to open our minds to becoming even more educated. Knowledge abounds us each and every day, but the fact that we know that there is so much more out there to learn and wanting to learn it, is the first step to what it means to be educated.