What It Means To Be Educated

Education is something that is always discussed by people but has never really had a definite meaning. No one really has an exact way to say if someone is in fact educated, or what it even means to be educated in the first place. A general consensus seems to be that one is informed when you have a large pool of knowledge to pull from and can spout generally esoteric facts. While that is something that may make a person intelligent, it does not necessarily correlate to being educated. Being educated is to have the ability to base opinions and stances on a strong foundation of facts, rather than just knowing a large number of things.
Facts, should be the backbone of anyone’s beliefs, even if one’s opinion is wrong, as long as it has basis in

reality it should be listened too, much like John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher says, in his work Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion “if the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose… the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth”. A good education is that of giving a student or whomever, enough knowledge about the world so that they can go out and form their own thoughts. A major problem we have today is people basing opinions on false information that they have received, particularly from the internet. People often see things around the web that just are not true but believe them anyway without doing any of their own research into the topic, and taking outrageous statistics on things like social media just because it looks professional. This phenomenon is something that could possibly relate to what famous Greek philosopher Plato means when describing what an education is not as he states it as a simply giving information to those who lack it, which is much like how people who do not have much insight on a topic receives a fact that may be totally wrong but accept it as a truth due to their ignorance on the subject, as well as a lack of effort to confirm the information.