Very often people describe others as being "educated" or "uneducated". What do you yourself see as the hallmarks of a truly educated person?. Please try to give a personal view. Please try to *forget* for a moment the fact that others may (or may not) assess "education" (in the sense of "educatedness") on the basis of things as diverse as formal academic qualifications, table manners and whether one says "it's me" or "it's I".

I look forward to hearing your views.

I've had my share of formal education but, in many ways and often overall, I am basically a numb skull. But that's because I've had it pretty easy in life (most of the time). I guess I'm talking book smarts vs. street smarts. I've met so many people who have the latter much more than the former and they always impress me. I always think of who I would partner up with in the event of some sort of holocaust. The guy/girl who can recite Shakespeare or the guy/girl who can find his way through the jungle? Both have merit, but the jungle fellow didn't purchase his education - so I think he has the best credentials since he learned it with will and spirit. If he could spew Shakespeare in addition would be a nice bonus, though .

What a question! It surely depends on the environment in which you live. Some of the best 'educated' people in the world are those such as the skilled bushmen of the Kalahari, elders of Australian Aboriginal families, South American Indians who still survive in the rainforest, and many others who have not received any 'classroom type schooling', yet possess vast amounts of knowledge which they have learnt from others or acquired by experience. Equally, those who are educated in the developed societies of most countries, to an extent where they are able, not only to survive, but to contribute to those societies are 'educated'.
Education can also have negative effects too, such as being taught or 'educated' to hate others for some reason or other, even to the extent where terrorism, murder and other crimes against society are considered legitimate.

What an ambiguous question to ask this early in the morning!

Just in my own somewhat limited experience, I have found two things to be true.
First - having an education cannot take the place of either native ability or common sense. I know probably a dozen full professors in one field or another. Some are dynamic, both in personality and career accomplishment. These are my favorites. They never take themselves or their pedigree too seriously. With twinkling eye, they often refer to themselves as 'overly educated'.They are filled with life and often find humor in ordinary things. Their native ability to love and be loved has prevented them from becoming wooden and self -absorbed.

The other sort of professional academic I have in mind is often clannish, humorless and slightly patronizing to those 'not part of their set'. They have a great zeal for voicing their opinions constantly on every subject. It is, apparently, their job to set everyone straight about even the most trivial subjects.
Somehow ,while getting more and more education they have managed to exclude themselves from learning the real business of life - that spark of enjoyment which makes being here in this limited dimension even worth the bother.

As for myself? I was lucky enough to be born at the end of an era where hard work and native ability were still respected and sought after. Even though I never attended journalism school, I was still able to intern at a small news company and learn to write on the job, thanks to the instincts of our publisher and his editor, who both believed I could learn to write. I even snagged a [small] AP award in the 1980's, for a series of articles about how county tax dollars are spent.
I was also raised in a family of forward thinkers and risk takers. My father believed I had the ability to do anything I wanted, [as long as it did not involve numbers!] Because of his optimism and my own hard work, I have held several job positions where people automatically assumed me to be a college graduate. I must admit to a sort of wicked joy at the shocked face people pull at learning I am, for all practical purposes, - uneducated!

[sorry to be so wordy, everybody ]

I'm intrigued to find that all three of you treat what I would call personal competence as a key attribute of being truly "educated".

It seems to me that in any society, personal competence is something more fundamental than being "an educated person". It's a prerequisite for being a full adult member of society. In turn, personal competence, I think, requires emotional maturity. To give a simple example: a person with good technical skills also needs to be able to get on with co-workers and customers - and others more generally. If he/she is quarrelsome and aggressive (immature) this may make it impossible. Technical competence alone isn't enough.

I should admit that - purely personally - I take a dim view of people who are incompetent and of people who are aggressive and immature. I think that to a large extent these attributes may be personality traits rather than education.

An educated person is one who:
1. Observes everything in his/her environment and makes connections between different observations.
2. Thinks critically, and is willing to question established "fact".
3. Is capable of putting his/her knowledge to use at the appropriate time.
4. Is well-read, and knows about the world around him/her.

These are the fundamental requirements that, according to me, are the pre-requisites of being truly "educated". I can't think of any others right now but I'm sure there're many more!

Aramis. I didn't mean to say you (or any of the other contributors) equated personal competence with being an "educated person", and that's why I referred "a key attribute" - not *the* key attribute. I'm sorry if I misunderstood your comments or gave anything you said an emphasis that was unwarranted.

I think of an educated person as one who has a broad base of knowledge and understanding. An educated person should have at least a basic understanding of scientific principles, of world history and geography, of art and music, of sport, of finance...
I spend a fair amount of time with engineers who have no interest in or knowledge of any other aspect of life. I also know several self-styled 'artists' who dismiss all science and math as 'number crunching'. Neither group really impress me as being educated, though they would probably disagree, and wave their degrees in my face.

It probably goes without saying that anyone who dismisses what we think of as the " established sciences" cannot really be considered a serious, productive person, regardless of their natural abilities. Therefore, their opinions and experiences might best be excluded as subject matter for debate!

I'm starting to think that an educated person is someone who doesn't take everything on a personal level .

Ah. The voice of reason speaks.

Education is a very general term, which we use to describe a lot. To me, I would say that education is:
1. Degrees etc
2. Emotional intelligence
3. The ability to be an aware and responsible member of society

Something that I've noticed is that most of us think that education ends when you graduate from school / college. I think a very important aspect of education is that it goes on, all your life. In every experience, good or bad, you're being educated and learning something new, something that may change you in some way and help in life later.

You can't progress if you rely on previous knowledge, and refuse to move on, to learn new things, to add onto your knowledge. Education never ends.

Sorry aramis, didn't really mean to pick on engineers as a group. My husband has an endless succession of young engineers passing through his life, so I have met many, on a social level, over the last twenty years. That is why I picked on them as representatives of the scientific, 'non-artsy' community.
I know a number of people who stand on either side of this math/art divide that seems to sprung up in our society. To my mind, it is a very silly divide indeed. (almost as silly as the science/religion divide, but that's another discussion).

No offence whatever taken, the forums are just 'chat' as far as I'm concerned - just that most if not all of the engineers I work with have a very broad range of interests, so I was curious why you'd mentioned engineers in particular. I think that with any specialised group of professionals, if you meet them mainly on a professional level, you invariably get a distorted perspective of what 'makes them tick'. Some of my mountaineering and sailing friends are lawyers, architects, lorry drivers, nurses, etc, but outside their employment you'd never know what they did unless you asked them.

I honestly had no idea there was such an abyss between the art and science communities. Maybe because I know so many individuals who are well -rounded in all areas. My son works for an engineering firm in a nearby town, yet canoes, writes poetry and can play anything with strings. My late husband held degrees in math, chemistry -and art history! I could list many others in my circle of family and friends who are both linear minded and artistic. I am, apparently, very fortunate to know them.

I deliberately didn't read any of the other posts first so I wouldn't be influenced by any other comments. In my experience there are two equal halves to a good education. One is the family, mainly parents/equivalent. My parents taught me enough by about the age of 8 for me to go off and educate myself for pleasure. I amassed medical books and joined the local geological society and spent the next number of years learning those subjects, closely followed by psychology and psychiatry. I still have thos books and sometimes find them very useful in my counselling practice. So until 15 I was educated, but not formally. Then I started my formal school exams and the second part of my education, the sort people recognise and pay you for.

But it turns out the greatest geniuses in each academic field, especially the inventors, had the bare minimum of education in their field, but knew what they did from their natural, informal education. Everyone knows Einstein, and I'll add the late musician Hans Keller, who was qualified at a basic level but one of the world's leading experts in composition, as was my grandpa, his pupil when they were both in their 70's (and was also a very educated musician and historian despite no formal schooling after 14).

So I've found the formal education to be very useful in life, but the potential to study the real test, as there are many people who missed out the first time who would all do very well academically if given the chance to.

Now let's see what everyone else has said!

Genuine BREADTH of knowledge.

Those who can genuinely be said to have cultivated this attribute are few and far between.

The life of Albert Schweitzer is instructive.

Doesn't the term 'educated' refer not only to academic education (degrees, certificates, qualifications...) but also to social education? In my opinion and educated person is one who has a certain literary/academic education, but also knows how to behave in social circumstances, and has been taught how to apply their knowledge to situations and their environment in a positive way. Being educated to me implies both elements. Someone who has certificates galore but doesn't know how to talk politely to guests is not educated, in my opinion. Likewise someone who is illiterate could be well educated in social graces and still have the basic knowledge of how to get along in the modern environment. I wouldn't call that person 'educated' in an academic sense, as the word implies a certain amount of formal learning and ability.

There's almost nothing said so far that I'd disagree with. Obviously, "educatedness" or being an educated person involves breadth of knowledge (plus some depth in one or more areas too, I would hope).

I believe one of the most important aspects of "educatedness" is a certain mindset, an attitude to knowledge - as well as knowledge already acquired and assimilated. Above all, an educated person is prepared to entertain the possibility that he or she may be mistaken, may even be talking nonsense. This doesn't mean that educated people give in easily; unless the point at issue is of little or no importance, they will want reasons and/or evidence that they are wrong ... The main thing is that they are prepared to listen and to learn.

When asking educated persons to consider that they may be wrong it should *never* be necessary to express oneself in the shockingly vivid terms used by Oliver Cromwell to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650: "I beseech you, in [by] the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".

An educated person doesn't for ever rely on authority. He or she is prepared to consider the possibility that Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary aren't the ultimate arbiters of accuracy, to use a couple of simple examples.

Hand in hand with this goes a willingness to learn, to continue learning. Educated people don't for ever insist that what they learned at school or university or on some course is true and beyond question.

On the other hand, "uneducated" people cling like desperadoes to what they "learned at school" or university or to what "the dictionary" or "Grandpa" or whoever or whatever told them. Perhaps they were told at school that the Renaissance started shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. If they are told later, as adults, that the Italian Renaissance had in fact started at over one hundred years earlier, that westward migration of scholars and others from Byznatium had already been in progess for over 150 years, they react as if a whole world were about to fall apart from them.

My tasks as a Funtrivia editor include dealing with correction notices and quizmakers' replies. Imagine my feelings when a quizmaker replied to a valid correction notice with the words "That's what I learned at school, and nobody can take it away from me". There was no willingness to consider very obvious possibilities - that he/she had remembered inaccurately or been taught wrongly, or both. There no sense of any obligation even to try to get the thing right, not a shred of commitment to accuracy. Far from wanting to learn, the person reacted as if trying to continue the learning process was a threat, something akin to being mugged! Wow!

The mindset that I associate with "educatedness" probably involves some sense of fundamental security. It presupposes the ability to tolerate uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity. So, in many crucial respects, "educatedness" is also a feature of one's personality.

Some very useful points there Bloomsby, I think towards the end you were starting to also cover intelligence as well as education, as there may also be a few very hard working but not very bright educated people who would still react in the way you said as their education was based purely on memory and repetition rather than an understanding of the subject behind that. On that point, I say the truly educated are those who find the facts first that others teach. For all the thousands of teachers, only a fraction actually originated the information through research, and the names I quoted are examples of some who did, and again, the contribution to the body of knowledge isn't directly related to the level of education. I know a few self-taught and basically educated scientists and engineers who regularly spot mistakes in manufacturer's products and have either been proved to be right when ignored, or otherwise had their ideas used for massive profits while working in a company with no credit to them. And anyone who remembers my engineer friend who is qualified who spends all his spare time on free energy and similar projects will see a spark of true genius in all these people, regardless of when they ended their formal studies.
So genius seems somehow to transcend education, and a genius will never accept what the teachers say if they see a fault in it, and many teachers I've come across have been duly shown up by pupils of all ages when the open-minded intelligence saw straight away the teacher was wrong, and couldn't tolerate accepting it in silence. Have we had a thread on genius already by the way?...

Thanks for your comments, Satguru. The thread on intelligence is still around, though dormant, and could be revived, but a completely new thread on genius would be most interesting. (I don't recall having seen a thread on the subject).

Leaving aside geniuses (who are rare) and people with 'a spark of genius' (who presumably aren't all that common, either) I'm still intrigued by the notion of "educatedness" as an essentially psychological attribute.

Consider two people of very similar intelligence in the sense of, say, IQ scores (after similar coaching). 'A' is a naturally relaxed person with a strong sense of security, while 'B' is profoundly insecure and decidedly twitchy about what others may think of him/her. It seems to me that for 'B' will have enormous problems becoming an "educated" person, while 'A' will find it much easier.

I don't see how an "authoritarian personality" (in the Adorno sense) can ever be a truly "educated" person. He/She may have high formal qualifications, plenty of breadth of knowledge but still be woefully lacking in what I would regard as "educatedness".

I suppose the key point is that I assume that an "educated person" has an enquiring mind. The person doesn't have to be brilliant, doesn't need to have a 'spark of genius', doesn't even need to be have a very high level of intelligence (though it helps), but needs that sense of inner security that makes an enquiring mind possible.

Now I feel tempted to say, "Back to you for the moment" as the FT "resident psychologist". However, I'd also love to read comments from people without any training in psychology.

(A postscript. I have doubts about the Adorno theory of the authoritarian personality. However, the theory does seem to identity a certain type of person, even if I feel there are elements of near caricature in the theory. Perhaps some day we'll have a thread on the "authoritarian personality". and also On the one hand I laugh at "authoritarians"; on the other I find them scary).

Edited to correct typos and to make good an omission.

I don't know, it seems to me that the term 'education' carries a connotation that it is imposed (or perhaps 'offered' would be a better word) from without. Maybe, though, it is the character of the educatee (how's that for a word?) which determines whether or not the education 'takes'.