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What Does It Mean to Be Educated? What does it mean to be educated? To answer that question begs another, deeper question, namely: What is the purpose of education? In essence, I see it as the means to a productive career, not an end in itself. To be educated means to have the knowledge needed to satisfy one's own needs as a human being by engaging in self-sustaining, self-generated action as a productive member of a free society. Moreover, I do not see education as some sort of static state. In other words, one is never truly "educated" in a finished sort of sense, but rather engages in "active learning" all the time to the best of his ability. I have learned a great deal of value since the end of my "formal" schooling based on my own curiosity, reading, seminars, on the job training, life experiences, and so forth. I get really, really irritated at finger waggling school marm types who make snooty remarks such as, "You are not truly educated until you have ..." "... learned a second language." "... walked a mile in your opponent's mocassins." "... performed sixty hours of community service." "... lived in another country." "... cared for a sick child." Yada, yada, yada. You get the idea. Hey, do you smell that? I smell it. It smells rotten. It has a foul funk to it. Wait! It's spewing from the mouths of the aforementioned snooty boots! Hey! Pretentious finger wagglers! Shut the funk up! I mean this sincerely. Formal education costs money. My goal is to close the length of time from personal net consumption to personal net production -- as measured by cash flow -- as quickly as possible while pursuing my career of choice. That marks the true measure of individuality, i.e. the maturation from dependent child to independent adult. Don't argue with me. Don't open your mouth. Don't flap your jaws. Don't talk to me. I have six words to shut your traps: "Show me your cash flow statement." Those who want to shove endless obstacles in my way between me and a productive career can take those obstacles and shove them up their pompous backsides whence they came. I mean, for example, useless requirements for humanities, foreign languages, etc. well beyond what one needs to live independently and productively as an engineer. If you want that liberal arts curriculum, fine. Just get out of my way. I am not just educated. I am an autodidact. I regularly listen to audio books and teach myself new skills all the time. I eschew blowhard professors in favor of self-paced, self-interested learning. I also do everything in my power to persuade others, via my articles and YouTube videos, of the wisdom of this viewpoint. All of this wisdom, acquired through my own years of self-study and hard experience, have driven me to question the wisdom of any educational program consisting of an overstuffed curriculum, breakneck learning pace, and crushing work load. There are alternative ways to learn that give a student much more leeway for choosing courses that could actually deliver more tangible value. I discuss these in my articles and videos. "The perfect is the enemy of the good." --Voltaire "The excellent is the enemy of the adequate." --Setzer As for "social education," you have to ask yourself how much the artificial environment of a campus actually prepares one for the real environment of a workplace or family life or even civic engagement. There are so many differences as to make them incomparable. So I have great trouble buying that argument, especially since some of us have no interest in raising children or running for office. I know this is an unpopular rant, but it needs to be said, and I am just the man to say it. As for you academic types who accuse me of ignorance while you rely on "big lies" to lure innocent students into spending tens of thousands of dollars on a "formal" education that will never pay for itself, I say: Shut the funk up! I have to wonder if you could ever live as a human being outside the world of academia with its endless streams of subsidies and grants. Are you truly educated? Can you engage in the self-sustaining, self-generated actions that distinguish an independent adult from a dependent child? Can you? No? Perhaps you need to go educate yourself on the basic economics of personal finance before you start waggling your fingers at the rest of us about exactly what constitutes a truly "educated" person.
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