Education
The definition of an educated person has no doubt altered over time. Certainly, many people have tried to formulate the ultimate definition of what an educated person is, and what achieving that state might entail. In my earliest thoughts about the subject, I probably thought an educated person was probably my grandmother; she seemed so wise, and certainly, I never asked her anything for which she didn't have an answer, and a good one at that. I hasten to add that I didn't necessarily think so at the time. When an adolescent love affair of mine had gone awry and I was miserable and mopey, she would advise me that the way to get out of the pits was to work at something, really hard. I wanted to wallow in misery. It took a few years more of life before I understood that, and even now, she was better at working herself out of a bad mood or a bad place than I will ever be. I still think she was an educated woman, although she had never finished her nursing degree. Later, I thought one of my high school teachers was probably the epitome of the educated person. He was my English teacher; he seemed to know so much about so much, and he had actually had short stories published. That seemed to me, when I was a junior in high school, to be the most educated thing a person could do.
If anyone had asked me on an academic quiz at that time who I thought best represented an educated person, I might have given the name Thomas Jefferson. He was the framer of the Constitution; pretty bright! He designed his beautiful home in Virginia, Monticello. He spent time in Paris: how wonderful! He had a greenhouse with plants unheard of in the colonies and the early United States; he grew oranges in his greenhouse. I would have chosen him over George Washington who was just a planter, surveyor, and general. Somehow, Thomas Jefferson just seemed so much more intellectual, despite the fact that his own concept of the educated person was the farmer. Jefferson admired a person who could live apart from others, pursue his own ideas about science, philosophy and art in his free time, and who could participate by choice in local community affairs. To Jefferson, a farmer's life "was a combination of aloneness, individuality, and self-learning with minimal but significant civic responsibility."
(Glickman, 2001) Jefferson himself, it seems to me, embodied all that. And when I first learned about him and began to admire him, I probably thought he was handsomer, too, and that might very well have influenced my impression of him as being terrible well educated.
I don't think there was ever a time when I would have said any U.S. politician during my lifetime was well educated, none that I can recall anyway. They seem to be too narrowly focused and too likely to bend ethics to expediency. And I certainly wouldn't choose any celebrity or actor/actress for the job. I might have chosen some of those from a previous generation, possibly Sir Laurence Olivier, for example. He seemed well educated, or perhaps it was just his regal bearing and British speech.
It is obvious, then, that communication is part of the definition of an educated person. Looking at these examples, the thing that stands out is that they all seemed able to communicate extremely well. OR at least, Jefferson seemed to have a more lasting public relations 'machine' keeping his talents and achievements more in the public eye than were Washington's.
Lynette Parker, in a review of The Cultural Production of an Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice, tried to find in that book a workable and possibly universal definition of the educated person, based on the readings in that book. One of the authors, she says, believes an educated person is an "attempt to override the untoward emphasis that has been placed on the power of class to shape cultural production." (1997) I would agree with that: class has no place in the definition of an educated person. In fact, I would have to say that...
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