Do You Have What It Takes? A Breakdown Of The Educated Person Essay

Do You Have What it Takes? A Breakdown of the Educated Person An educated person is a well rounded person. To be educated is to knowledgeable in many areas. Diversity is essential in the sense that many different things inspire thought, which then derive permanent conclusions from these experiences. Anyone who has the audacity to call themselves educated needs to have a firm grasp of many different areas. These categories span through Science, Technology, Language, Art, Feelings and Values. All of these are building blocks that help make up an educated person, but just as important, these are the same qualities that form an individual. One of the most important concepts that a person learns from Science is a fundamental thinking process. This process starts with curiosity, asking the question," Why does that work?" It then moves on to theorizing or guessing. Next, this person takes his or her theory and puts it to the test by conducting various experiments. Finally this individual will draw a final conclusion from those findings. Science also helps a person look at things objectively, which means there is no feelings influencing experiments that can lead to fraudulent conclusions. This can be a double edged sword however, because in many instances when a scientist is emotionally removed from the experiments performed, the question, "Should I?", is never asked. For instance under the reign of Hitler many cruel medical experiments were preformed. In The Medical Experiments by William Shirer the author states,"Prisoners were placed in high pressure chambers and subjected to high-altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were injected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice. They were subjected to 'freezing' experiments in icy water or exposed naked in the snow outdoors until they froze to death." This also deals with the subject of values and will be discussed detail later. Probably the most positive way to utilize Science would be to take it to the next level, Technology. This is were an educated person takes what laws and theories he learns in science and integrates them into everyday life, finding ways to make life easier and arguably better. I say arguably because many educated people are against technological advancement. These... ...m any language. Susanne K. Langer in her article The Cultural Importance of Art states,"There is, however, an important part of reality that is quite inaccessible to the formative influence of language: that is the realm of so-called "inner experience," the life of feeling and emotion. All of these attributes lose power without an individual set of values to focus this energy. Adolf Hitler influenced millions by being a masterful orator. Hitler also was very innovative in science and many other areas. However do to his grossly warped sense of personal values he was labelled by leaders and peers as a madman. It is very difficult for any person to be a master of all of these categories, but to be truly educated, there needs to be at least a small concentration of everything in that individual's background. For the one reason that it is so difficult to posses all of these traits, it is also that same reason that makes all of the truly educated people of our past stand out in history as heros and leaders. This is also the biggest reason that so many people admire them and strive to be like them.