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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Please, any monkey can get a high school diploma, doesn't take much to get that anymore.  Think about some of the people you went to high school with.

Any sort of post-high school degree would denote being educated.  However, when you speak of education, what does this mean?  Educated in what?

And the junk about naming 5 operas--I get what that poster was getting at (intellectual curiosity beyond what you 'need to know', but it's more about learning things just because--what if you can't name 5 operas and their composers, but you can speak very intelligently about Ptolemic Egypt, for example?  You are still educated (moreso--memorization isn't a function of analytical thinking.)[/quote]

Exactly. That stupid post about reciting poems and the dates of wars and operas - that's just memorization. Anyone, anywhere, can spit that crap out. It means absolutely nothing.[/quote]

I was certainly not suggesting anyone go out and try to memorize these things. And of course the list of facts and concepts I chose, and the areas those factoids represent is very random and subjective. But I do believe that these are the sort of things that a person who received a good secondary education and has some natural curiosity about the world would know and do. Like for example you don't have to love opera, but if you are curious about history and art, and if you read a wide variety of books, there is no way you can't name at least five operas if you think about it.[/quote]

So what you're saying is have some interests and explore those interests. What you listed was YOUR interests, or to be more specific, a list of stuff that you can recite without any critical thinking attached to it whatsoever. The list just represents a bunch of useless facts. Those are two entirely different concepts. So I would add to being educated - learn how to communicate properly so that the message you think you are sending is what's heard.[/quote]

I agree with PPs that one does not need formal education to succeed in life. Nor does one need classical poetry or the rudiments of physics. There are several people in my immediate circle who I love and respect and look up to who are not very educated in either sense.

Reading and writing well, that is, thinking critically about what you read, and expressing yourself in a concise and logical manner, is a big part of education. And you are right, my list of "useless facts" was an example of sloppy writing. The idea I was trying to express was that a truly educated person is curious and knowledgeable about a variety of things, not just those they specialized in at school or those they feel most passionate about. That knowledge is not defined by a list of names, numbers and dates, and it certainly does not come from dumb memorization. But it is generally the ignorance of factoids that educated people consider to be common knowledge that betrays an uneducated person in social settings. 
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