Daniel Im

IB Lang 11

Moosman 3

What does it mean to be Well Educated?

Education is the knowledge obtained from the process of learning. This is an important

aspect of life because almost all of the choices made are from one’s education. However, not

everyone is equally educated but that does not mean that one is not well educated while the other

is well educated. Being well educated means that the person is well attuned to the outside world,

has the ability to appreciate and enjoy the knowledge that they are taught and to be able to use

this knowledge to better help themselves and others in life. These are what makes up the idea of

being well educated and should be something that is strived for.

One of the parts of being well educated is being attuned to the outside world. What this

means is that well educated people are well aware about the world around them and knowing

what is true and false. This is explored a lot during Tara Westover’s book, Educated. This was a

story about Tara’s experience as a child with a very closed perspective of the world due to her

father, Gene, suffering from paranoid fears about the federal government. Because of this, Gene

closes his entire family off from the rest of the world making it hard for them to become “well

educated” until Tara grew up and started to gain independence. This is when she started to learn

more about the outside world and realized that her childhood was a lie. The part where she starts

to see beyond her childhood is the part where she starts to reach a point of being better educated.

During chapter 20 of this book, Shawn calls Tara the ‘n’ word and Tara didn’t really know what

this world was for or what it meant, but then she had a lesson on the history of African

Americans in the U.S. in her American history class and this is when it hit Tara that she was
being called a racial slur. Tara says, “ I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will

ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of

awareness.”(Westover, 228) This is when Tara became more aware of the real world and things

that she should know about. She realized the reason why she shouldn’t support her brother’s use

of the n word because she has become educated in the history of that word. Though she hasn’t

reached the point of being well educated, she is making progress to this point. This is one of the

important aspects of being well educated. *

Another aspect that is important for being well educated is the enjoyment of the things

learned. When people enjoy what they are learning, it becomes less of a task and more of a

passion for the person leading to better and more creative results of their works… Ken Robinson

talks about how education should be used to fuel and support one’s creativity because of how it

will better allow people to pursue something they are passionate about and do better at that than

pursue something they don’t have much care over.

Besides enjoyment of education, using the knowledge is important to better develop ideas

and grow as a person and humanity… As seen by Tim leuings TED talk, he talks about the

importance of education and how it better allows the creation of much more revolutionary ideas

and inventions. One of the examples that he gives is the one about the steam engine and how this

was created based on other ideas

These aspects, being attuned to the world, enjoyment of the education and the ability to

use this education. They show the effectiveness and commitment of the person to better use this

education for good, making them more well educated and better fit to be known as better
educated. So to be well educated means to have all these aspects parrot of one’s knowledge and

learning process.