Korean Job Discussion Forums

[waynehead]

It's like pornography. Hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

[mikeyboy122]

Indeed. There is no substitute for experience. NONE!

[MissSeoul]

[Grab the Chickens Levi]

[Grab the Chickens Levi]

Would you say that an educated person would know their Baudelaire from their Baudrillard, their Derrida from their Derrier, an egoiste from an egotist, their Shubert from their Schuman and their Wolf from their Woolf...?

Or just their arse form their elbow?

[Thiuda]

Ok, a lot of good points have been made, so I'll try and characterize 'educated' in another manner, hopefully avoiding the educated vs. ignorant dichotomy.

An educated person is one who is able to critically evaluate new information against existing information. This necessarily presupposes an existing body of knowledge, be it life experience or schooling, and training in observation and reflection, analysis and evaluation.

Hmm, getting better, but I'm beginning to think that being 'well educated' is as much a function of education, as it is of an individuals character and personality, i.e. intelligence, curiosity, creativity...etc.

[Unposter]

Generally agree, an educated person is skilled at thinking and learning.

As for how does one know when one can do such things, I guess you just have to look at one's track record. what exactly do we ever know for certain... At best we can make a good argument, base it on solid criteria and reasoning and hope people agree.

I did find it interesting some people, who I will assume are English, said politeness or manners was a sign of being educated.

[blurgalurgalurga]

Educated by modern 'first-world' standards, or in a classical sense? Surely Voltaire must be considered to have been an educated man, but he didn't know diddly about Surreallism or quantum physics. Neither do I; nor do I know much about Voltaire. My accumlated knowledge, though, is nonetheless massive compared to most people in the world, who have never been to school at all.
What about Jesus? Was he educated?
How about Thomas Aquinas?
How about Newton?
How about Hawking, for that matter? He knows his physics, obviously, but how much does he know about hockey? How good would he be as a firefighter or a seal-clubber? He's not educated in those things, so is he uneducated? By the same token, the world's best civil engineers might know absolutely nothing about neurology or art or astronomy. Are they, then, uneducated?
And that's not even bringing into it Brazilian hunter-gatherers, who by most standards are uneducated, but are, still, quite well learned in their own way. How many of us could successfully navigate the Amazon rainforest on foot, and not get slimed by poisonous frogs and eaten by fire-ants?

My longwinded rambling point, then, is this: education is totally relative to surroundings, historical setting, and also to specialities. Our university system--named such because it is (supposedly) the repository of Human Knowledge as a whole--schools people in tightly focussed areas of expertise, while shielding them, more often than not, from other conflicting schools of thought. Am I to assume that only people from my faculty are educated, because only we lit geeks can easily read Chaucer? Obviously not. Am I then uneducated, because I don't know a gluon from a glutamate?
Obviously, I hope, not.

[KirbyMagnus]

[KirbyMagnus]

I spelt pretentious with an extra "n". That obviously makes me thick. Damn.

[blurgalurgalurga]

Dunno if decency and politeness are signs of edumacation. What about Mengele, the famous Angel of Death--he was an MD, so obviously educated. He was not decent. Also, I've met lots of polite people who are pure evil: and also, many impolite people who are completely trustworthy and honest and by most senses of the word, good...
Ah, I give up. I've decided I disagree with most of what I said anyway. Fun to read your opinions though, thanks.

[Thiuda]

Some good questions blurgalurgalurga.

When I say educated, I do not necessarily mean in a 'first world sense'. One might characterize 'education' as imparted knowledge that allows the individual to survive/succeed/thrive in their respective surroundings. This then means that Voltaire was an educated man for his time, and so were Aquinas and Newton. Furthermore, as I stated in a previous post, they would be considered educated also because they used critical reasoning skills, which I feel are the hallmark of an educated person. And, while Hawking might be ignorant of the finer points of hokey and seal clubbing, hockey players and seal clubbers might be considered less educated than him, if they cannot think in a critically reflective manner on new information in the way that Hawking could.

[Thiuda]

[blurgalurgalurga]

I agree with you, Thiuda, that critical thinking and the ability to adapt to new stimuli are signs of an educated person. Hopefully those are skills most of us learned. I think some of that might even be innate, too, especially to 'intelligent' people (and there's a whole new can of worms there too--what is 'intelligence?'), and maybe to the species as a whole. Until we get it drilled out of us, I guess, and taught obedience as an alternate survival skill.
And yet...if somebody is a skilled regurgitator of facts and figures, a magnificent memorizer (as are so many of our students here in Korea), but lack critical thinking and analysis, are they not educated?
I'd probably argue that they were in fact educated, but that their education was lame.
But is 'lame' a good description, when the grading scheme is so heavily skewed to favour the parroters, and burn the ones who come at a problem from a tangent? Maybe it comes back to 'learning what helps you succeed in your environment;' if subservient parrots do well here, and the mouthy are punished, is it a disservice to teach people to be critics?
That last point is unpleasantly close to Schertzer's thing yesterday about How We Should Not Teach Western Concepts to Asians, so I disown it, shuddering.

[Grab the Chickens Levi]