Toward an Ethics for Being Educated

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Toward an Ethics for Being Educated

ABSTRACT: The regulative ideal of being educated is construed through features associated with the conduct and aspirations of faculty in higher education. These features include autonomy of mind and its presuppositions in self-knowledge and ability to inquire. These features as well cover having the identity of an educated person, implying evaluation of the products of the mind in logic and language, motivation to maintain an education, and the deep convictions and attitudes characteristic of the academic, humanist, and scientist. Finally, these features encompass knowing how to apply professional methods in reading and evaluating professional literature, identifying what is potentially educative, seeking a deepening of values through value inquiry, and the application of values in a constructive manner. However, the most promising motivation is commitment to oneself. Other motivators, such as love of learning and curiosity, will be transitory. Commitment can be to prescriptions based on the features associated with the regulative ideal. These prescriptions would in turn comprise a rudimentary ethics for being educated.

Three Concepts of an Educated Person

In discussions of institutional education, three general and sometimes overlapping senses of the term "educated person" are in common usage. In the first sense, anyone is educated who has successfully completed a school's program. Regardless of what has been learned, a person is said to be educated by the fact of program completion or graduation. In other words, actual learning is not the criterion for calling a person educated. This may explain the comment that a persons education cant be taken away.

The second sense specifies c...

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...can be to this ethic. The prescriptions would have personal development as their common theme. Most of us take personal development, however, as discretionary. In our society, we would not be censured for rejecting personal development in favor of a life of action for example. Subscribing to such an ethic, then, would ordinarily be done for other reasons such as the ends it serves or the attractiveness of the ideal itself. From personal experience, I know of many faculties in higher education who have committed themselves to the ideal. In many of their lives, their obligation to self is complemented by other motivators such as appetites, inquisitiveness, ends, instructions, opportunities for inquiry, and incipient doubt. But, is the regulative ideal as depicted worth fealty? This depends upon our philosophy of life which I think we have given considerable attention.

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