When someone is referred to as “An educated man” I have always assumed it is meant as a compliment regarding their general knowledge and ability to hold an intelligent conversation on many different subjects.
However, I have also noticed that it only ever seems to apply to people with traditional ‘arts degree’ level education in areas such as history, literature, politics etc. It seems that you could be an utter whiz in physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, organic chemistry and micro-biology and yet, if you hadn’t read any classic French poetry you’d be regarded as coarse and vulgar by those people who decide who is and isn’t ‘educated’.
Now, in todays world it really doesn’t matter whether or not you get called ‘educated’ by a bunch of snobs so my question is just for curiosity, but does anyone else here find that term a bit antiquated and confusing in the modern world?
I think someone who complains that evolution is just a theory is every bit as ignorant as someone who regards Plato as one of those Greek buttfuckers. And damn straight it matters: If we are to live in a democracy, if the people are supposed to rule, then the people have to have a clue.
But that’s just me.
I have never heard the term being restricted to classic French poetry. I also never heard it applied to people who only study literature but are ignorant about basic physics or evolution.
Yes, somebody can be a whiz in physics, but if he never read a poem (regardless of language), never listened to music beyond some pop in the background, never played sports or did anything beyond his field, then he’s stunted both intellectually (thintelligence is the word an author coined for it) and emotionally. How can you be a full human being if you haven’t experienced emotions and thought about things beyond your own narrow horizon? Learned about history and man’s follies (to avoid mistakes in your own work), read literature to know about hybris and pathos (and what customers want vs. what people need), learned about people who life a different life from your own?
A person who’s only read literature and listened to music, but doesn’t know about Newton or evolution is a similar kind of idiot, because he isn’t fit to live in the modern world. He can’t make intelligent, informed decisions in his daily life if he doesn’t understand the basic way things work; and he can’t make informed decisions regarding bigger things in his community and country.
If you believe that people who like literature and are trying to teach it to others are snobs, then you reveal that
a) you didn’t learn any literature yourself and
b) are a stunted person because of it. I’m sorry for you. Maybe you can learn to grow up and beyond your limitations.
I have noticed this before too. That to some educated = cultured = the arts / humanities.
The term “intellectual” seems to also be associated by some with those kinds of subjects.
I agree with the ther posters. I think it’s about both knowing something about science and related fields of knowledge, BUT ALSO being able to think critically about evidence – and a big part of that is being able to but knowledge in a cultural and historical framwork, which requires having some familiarity with the “arts” (i.e., “humanities”).
That said, there is a fine line between high-art knowledge and entertainment. There is a certain degree of snobbishness involved when we elevate a familiarity with, say, Bach, over familiarity with, say, Jay-Z.
But the “educated person” will have picked up enough knowledge to evaluate and enjoy even hip-hop in a deeper way than one who isn’t so. He/she, for example, will likely be drawn to the brilliant wordplay of, say, Chino-XL. The person who dismisses hip-hop out of hand because it isn’t like Bach doesn’t, in my view, deserve to be called quite so “educated”.
I would say literature cats have every right to feel fulfilled in what their studies have taught them. My main gripe was that the humanities seem to carry far more status than the ‘hard’ sciences and that this seems unfair today.
I am unable to grow up and beyond my limitations because my limitations limit me from growing up and beyond them. I’m also a sarcastic bastard!
Well, at least you can take solace in the SDMB, where we are just as enthused by the contributions of Voyager, Indistinguishible, or Colibri as we are by those of Johanna, carnivorousplant, or elucidator.
One other aspect is that for centuries, people had practical knowledge in the mechanical and physical aspect when they learned a job. But learning only the knowledge you need to do your job - knowing only how to push a lever or what to put into a test tube to get a result - without knowing anything else is limiting. It means that the person limits themselves to the likes of an animal or meat machine: work, eat, (have sex), sleep, with no other interests.
A college education is not necessary to be interested in people and life beyond your own horizon - and many people finish four years of college with very little knowledge beyond what they need for their job, while others who left school after7th grade have an interest in the world beyond them or paint pictures in their spare time. That’s why the words “education” and “knowledge” refer to two very different things.
True, although the terms can also mean almost the exact opposite of the distinction you make, at least in other languages. This was brought home to me when I learned Spanish, and discovered that bien educado/a literally means “well educated”, but is used to mean something more like “kind, well-mannered, well-raised, not a jerk”. Thus, a poor Mayan farmer who never finished second grade is more likely to be* bien educado* than a CEO with an MBA living in a gated suburb of Monterrey.
Not exactly the same as “curious about the wider world”, but there’s definitely overlap there.
That might be true of engineering, say, but for much of science’s history it has been an unprofitable and purely intellectual pursuit for those who have had the spare time (and money).
And today, I don’t believe it is true that someone fairly ignorant of the arts has their eyes shut or has only learned what they needed for their job; you can have a pretty broad knowledge of the universe without touching on art.
I should add: I would also have no problem with someone being well versed in the arts but being fairly ignorant of science / maths. As long as such a person is aware of their ignorance.
In any case, I would be consistent: if Science Man is not “educated”, then neither is Arts Man.
In my experience, referring to someone as “educated” or “well-educated” (in American English) does not mean only that s/he has a good breadth of knowledge and can speak intelligently on many different subjects, but that s/he also has the benefit of a formal education.
I have never noticed the word “educated” being used in this narrow sense. If anything, studying science or math at the college level seems to be generally considered more difficult/serious and thus more impressive than studying the arts, humanities, or social sciences. I don’t think people make “Would you like fries with that?” jokes about Physics majors the way they do about English Lit or Philosophy majors. Engineering and computer science are perhaps less respected, which I’d guess is because of the perception among some that these disciplines are basically vocational training and not truly intellectual.
For most of history, the study of theoretical science was the pursuit of people who had finished a university = liberal arts education (both for time and money reasons); but practical science = engineering in the broadest sense was trade school.
And in today’s US colleges it appears that the only things taught are those relevant to the job, nothing else, going by the many anecdotes of the Dopers about people who are in college or have finished it and still have no education at all, just the knowledge for their job.
If you don’t read any fiction or anything beyond what your job requires, how can you be versed in the universe? Also, I was not talking about knowledge - knowledge is bare bones, what a robot can find in a dictionary and a parrot can repeat. Education means forming a human person with a character. This is traditionally tried with using the classic text - hence humanistic studies, but is not always guaranteed (many people know greek and latin, but aren’t very humane - see Alfred Andersch’s “Der Vater eines Mörders” The father of a murderer as example).
This also means that somebody who’s a jerk with an MBA is not really educated, he’s just stuffed full of knowledge.
I have a big problem with those people, since if they don’t recognize how important the basics of natural science is in todays’ world, then they are dumb and not aware of their ignorance. After all, ignorance on important basics should be remedied, not celebrated or shrugged off. (Ignorance in unimportant matters, like celebrities or sports, is neglible).
Actually, when it’s applied to individuals, it refers to that person being educated because they are a character and not because they can recite the Illias or decline mensa.
When talking about the broad scope of needing to educate children / the population better, you need to come up not only with a minimum canon of what knowledge people need, but with additional ways to build characters, individuals who know how to think instead of robots who follow authority.
constanze, I’m a little confused about your position. For most of your response you suggest that it is necessary for someone to read fiction, to know about natural science etc.
Then at the end you say being educated is more about character and knowing how to think. Which is it?
Responding more specifically to some of the points:
I was saying that for most of science’s history it has not been vocational. You’ve agreed with me, as far as theoretical science goes, but not practical science.
We could now go into the semantics of what we consider practical science to be, but I could see that being quite open-ended, so I’ll just adjust my point slightly:
It has never been the case that science or mathematics were only studied vocationally.
I said you could have a broad knowledge while being fairly ignorant of art.
I didn’t say without knowing anything beyond what your job requires.
By “fairly ignorant” I meant having the standard scientific knowledge that everyone receives in compulsory education which in most cases includes the basics of natural science (at least here in the UK).
Some people just have no interest, and possibly aptitude, for understanding cosmology, say, and I personally have no problem with someone saying “I don’t know much about that, and I don’t care”.
And your latter point doesn’t follow. You absolutely can be aware of your ignorance.
One is the pre-requisite for the other, but also vice-versa.
If you look at the history of teaching, people studied the classics (humanities) because it was believed that by reading poetry and dramas, you would develop a character and be interested in other people etc. (As I said it’s not 100% guaranteed).
But on the other hand, you need to have a character - empathy, curiosity, such qualities - in the first place to actually receive something from poetry or listening to music.
Today, where everybody who leaves school can read, and books are easily available, two different paths can make somebody educated: the traditional university path - where fiction is used to form (budding) character traits; and the self-taught path - where existing character traits lead a person to seek out beyond necessity, reading fiction etc. to broaden their mind.
Part of the problem is that not only “education” is such a broad word, but also “character”. Trying to define it would require not several paragraphs, but an essay of several pages. Or think of the poem “If you can … then you’re a man, my son” outlining qualities an adult person in the full sense should have.
So an educated person in the full sense has qualities - empathy with other people, interest in them, curiosity about the world - as well as skills - critical thinking, forming of opinions, discussing them - plus a well-laid basis of knowledge on which to base his opionins and form his conclusions from.
Um, math dates back to the old Egyptians who used the phytagorean triangle to re-measure the fields each year after the floods. And tax officials needed to know math, too - purely practical.
I don’t know if you’re coming from this theoretically, but I’m thinking of practical examples of people I know - and usually people who have only practical knowledge are not interested in anything else (“where’s the profit in learning about that?” is the common attitude). This means that a physics major not only will not read a nice poem or listen to music to be touched by it, they will also not read a personal biography of the struggle of inner-city blacks or gay teens in the Midwest; they will not look at what biology has found about cooperation between different population groups, or how global warming will affec the poorer countries.
This is not what I call “broad knowledge”. I simply can not imagine somebody who has studied all natural sciences out of interest, but never looked at one single painting or picture of a flower, read one poem and be moved by it, gotten interested in another human being.
I didn’t know you’re from the UK, but most of the Dopers here are from the US. And there have been a lot of anecdotes about people completing 4 years of college even and not knowing most basic natural science (for arts majors) or one work of literature (for natural science majors). The US doesn’t have compulsaroy tables of basic knowledge you can expect people to know. So somebody with a MBA in economics can be ignorant both of global warming or why mixing bleach and toilet cleaner is a bad idea, and what Romeo and Juliet refers to, but according to AE usage, that person is educated because they finished a college.
That’s why I differentiated between “necessary basic” knowledge and unimportant one. If you mean cosmology as knowing that there are 8 planets moving around the sun and so on, yes I expect an educated person to know about that and care. Otherwise, they won’t be able to understand if you explain to them why comets are dangerous, and what we could do about them.
This is a huge exaggeration, unless the people in question are unusually stupid/forgetful. Every four year American college that I am familiar with requires students to take courses outside their major. There are typically “general education” requirements specifying that one needs X number of credits in each of several different academic fields in order to graduate. The only science I had in college was BIO 101 (plus lab), which isn’t much, but no one could have graduated from my college with less science than that.
Science and literature are of course also taught prior to college. While we don’t have a standardized national curriculum, most American high schools cover Romeo and Juliet in freshman English.
Oh, and an MBA is a graduate degree. While the coursework in an MBA program is going to be focused on business-related subjects and not Shakespeare, anyone going for an MBA already has a four year undergraduate degree.
Ah but that changes from country to country and school to school. Just a few datapoints from systems I’m familiar with:
In Spain, the courses which are compulsory for everybody in HS are more on the “arts and humanities” part of the spectrum than on the science part (something which those of us with a scientific bent found quite irritating, so I know where the OP is coming from) - our universities, OTOH, do not bother with “general culture” requirements since people are expected to have obtained those in HS. We get our bachillerato from high school, you get your bachelor’s from university, and in both cases it’s supposed to involve some “general culture” - but people going for degrees in Art History are not required to take as many credits of Math or Biology as people going for Physics have to take from their first language, second languages, Literature, History…
In Germany, I worked with people who’d gotten their “bachelor’s” in Organic Chemistry, their master’s in Orgo, and who were working on or had PhD’s in Orgo: not only were they lacking in the arts/humanities, they were seriously lacking as chemists due to not understanding the hows, whys and wherefores of the reactions they designed.
That may be true, but I was responding to a criticism of American higher education in particular. It must be very rare, if it’s even possible at all, to graduate from an American university without having studied any science or any literature, which is the claim **constanze **made.
Oh, it’s absolutely possible, and it is a lot easier to graduate with no knowledge of science than with no knowledge of arts/humanities.
The American university where I taught had Humanities requirements for Chemistry, CompSci, Physics, Math and Engineering degrees. They did not have Science or Math requirements for English. As for the level of math required in the US before entering college, excuse me while I crack up.
I will take your word for it that this university did not require a single math or science course of English majors, but as this is the first time I have ever heard of an American university with such a policy I would need cites to believe that this school is not a rare exception. I just Googled “general education requirements” and checked the first few schools that came up, and I did not see any where some form of math/quantitative reasoning was not required of all BA students, and only one where it was possible to not take at least one natural science course.
[ul]
[li]SUNY: Mathematics is required. Natural Science is not, provided one takes courses in enough of the other subject areas.[/li][li]UC Davis: At least 6 credits in Science and Engineering.[/li][li]Penn State: 6 credits in Quantitation, 9 in Natural Sciences[/li][li]University of Wisconsin-Madison: 3 to 6 credits in Quantitative Reasoning (includes math, statistics, and logic), plus 4 to 6 credits in Natural Science[/li][li]Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania: 12 credits in Natural Science and Mathematics[/li][/ul]