Perhaps one of the most difficult questions to provide a concrete and universal definition for is the concept of an ôeducatedö person. As Peter Gay (1) maintains:
The question is risky. It is also difficult, because no single answer is likely to hold û certainly not completely û for more than one time, more than one place. Different cultures, different centuries, generate different definitions.
Despite the difficulty in providing such a definition, the purpose of this essay is to offer a definition of an ôeducated personö and to identify the areas that make an educated person so.
The importance of being educated cannot be underestimated for its impact on the quality of life of the individual. As one college asserts in its curriculum catalogue, ôEducation can help us live more complete and meaningful lives by nurturing essential values and skillsö (College, 1). The education person is an individual who has, either through formal study or self-taught study, learned much about the world in which he or she lives, the ways that objects and processed in the material world function, and a great deal about human nature and psychology. An educated individual is more like than not to have developed the capacity for using his or her cognitive and metacognitive skills in the pursuit of knowledge and the in the learning process.
An educated person also has a number of other skills that make him or her ôeducated.ö These include both oral and written communication skills, interpersonal skills and the ability to resolve conflict, and, perhaps most especially, the educated person is one who has moved beyond parochialism and has initiated the process of participating in universalism in a significant manner. The use of rational and logical thought or higher order thinking skills is also necessary to be considered an ôeducatedö person. The ôeducatedö person is one who has learned to refrain from using stereotypes and...