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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So the founder of Microsoft would not be highly educated.

Okay.

[/quote]

That's correct. He's brilliant, but he's not "highly educated."

"Educated" doesn't do the work people think it does. It means something specific, and that thing is not "smart."[/quote]

Beyond his business endeavors, Gates reads so many books. He travels the world talking to world leaders and ordinary people too. He created an enormous foundation fighting poverty and disease.

You think someone who studies one thing such as Plutach's vision on Alexander the Great for years is more educated?[/quote]

The root word is "educare"--to lead out, which implies that someone else is leading the person being educated. This is why autodidacts get the modifier "self" in "self-educated."

The process of becoming educated involves mastery of one or more disciplines, which gives the educated person a specific set of lenses with which to view problems and imagine solutions. Nobody creates a discipline alone. This includes Gates, no matter how many people he talks to. He is well-read and well-traveled and a very smart guy--all of which some "highly educated" people are not--but those things don't make him "highly educated."

Whether your example Plutarch obsessive is actually more educated, IDK. Has this person convincingly demonstrated systematic inculcation in the disciplines associated with classical studies (including the languages)? Then yes. If this person is super into the one text and has memorized it and read it until the book is falling apart, but has no understanding of its place in relationship to the rest of human knowledge and achievement, then no--that person is not "highly educated."

This is what I mean when I say that "educated" doesn't do the work people think it does, as a word. [/quote]

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