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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ewomack, post: 3949529, member: 15588&quot;]&quot;Education&quot; is such a loose term. Is someone with a degree educated? Or do they just have a degree? Having a degree is no assurance of intelligence, creativity, ingenuity, knowledge retention or ability to apply learning to situations. It just means that you were able to get through the system without failing out. Saying that some people are &quot;more educated&quot; than others is difficult to prove, hard to pin down and comes close to a meaningless statement. If you want to prove that some demographic has more degrees than some other demographic, that&#039;s potentially provable. You can look up the numbers and compare. But &quot;being educated&quot; can mean so much more than having a degree. To me, someone who is &quot;educated&quot; has gone beyond the standard curriculum, studies widely in many fields, seeks connections between the fields that they have studied, can clearly state positions that they don&#039;t agree with, applies that knowledge to something useful or tangible and has the ability to engage in big-picture thinking. They have a well-rounded base knowledge of many things. Most of all, they don&#039;t stop learning after their &quot;education.&quot; They are life-long learners. That&#039;s a hard thing to measure and it doesn&#039;t necessitate having a degree of any kind, yet the educational system seems to undermine this kind of thinking and learning. </p><p><br /></p><p>One story I&#039;m sure I&#039;ve shared before is the argument I had years ago with a few MBAs about when the American Civil War occurred. I was at my desk at work and a small group approached me and one of them asked, &quot;so, when was the civil war?&quot; I first confirmed that they were talking about the American Civil War, because there have been many civil wars and they said yes. So I said &quot;roughly 1861 to 1865. Some people might also include 1860, but that&#039;s a minor point.&quot; There was a silence and someone, someone much older than me at the time, came forward and said &quot;then what&#039;s all this 1776 stuff about?&quot; A difficult conversation followed which ended with the person shocked that the US had once gone to war with Great Britain. In the eyes of everyone this was an &quot;educated&quot; person with an MBA and she held a fairly high position in the company. But she didn&#039;t even possess basic knowledge about the history of her own country. At the time I was a low-level worker who apparently had a reputation for &quot;knowing stuff.&quot; This &quot;stuff&quot; didn&#039;t come from extra intelligence, it came from the reading that I&#039;ve always done and still do. At that point, I had completed my undergraduate degree, but had not yet started my Master&#039;s. This situation made me immediately suspicious of people who others deem &quot;educated&quot; merely by the acronyms on their resumes. A degree only goes so far. People need to &quot;educate&quot; themselves.</p><p><br /></p><p>In this sense, and this is obviously not a scientific statement, I generally find younger people less &quot;educated&quot; than older people mostly due to life experience alone. A few exceptions have occurred. Younger people typically haven&#039;t had time to experience many of the things that older people have. Mark Zuckerberg&#039;s statement, and others like it, that &quot;younger people are smarter&quot; largely reflects the thinking of a younger person. They don&#039;t yet understand all of the forces acting on the minds and lives of older people. I didn&#039;t when I was younger. It also implies that as he gets older he&#039;s also getting stupider. I have a feeling that he didn&#039;t intend that. Many people do allow themselves to get behind by not engaging in life-long learning. This of course doesn&#039;t have to be the case and it has nothing to do with having a degree. I feel much more educated now than I did in my 20s. If I didn&#039;t feel this way, I would have gone wrong somewhere. After all, I&#039;ve had more time to read, experience, discuss and argue than someone decades younger than me. A lot of my narrow-minded arrogance has dissipated (probably not all of it), but not all young people suffer from this. Education numbers and generalizations will never reflect any of these more substantive definitions of &quot;educated.&quot; If only they could.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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