Educated Person example essay topic

Do You Have What it Takes? A Breakdown of the Educated Person by Thomas Burkhardt 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 isa 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 S hirer 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 philosophers say that technologies are being probed without understanding and therefore they are being abused. These philosophers feel that this will be the chief downfall of humankind. Mary E. Clark showed her opposition in her article Science and Values, in which she states,' When such knowledge is used to manipulate Nature we call it 'technology', and over the past century this manipulative capacity has grown to the point where we can now annihilate ourselves as a species. ' Another important aspect of being an educated person is a firm grasp of the use of Language.

This person needs to develop the gift of relating his thoughts and feelings into a clear and interesting way. Many people try to use large words and awkward vocabulary to sound educated, but a true educated person can relate an idea in a way that any person could understand. In his article Simplicity, William Zinsser advocates this idea when he makes points like, 'We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. ' and,' The person snoozing in a chair, holding a magazine or book, is a person who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer. ' To be an educated person is a person that not only can relate ideas to someone else, he can also understand other peoples ideas and feelings and can use them to draw over all conclusions to answer the questions at hand. In addition an educated person must be in touch with inner feelings, this person must know thyself, and must value the importance of feelings and life itself. Robertson Davies in his article about people with emotional atrophy called The Deadliest of Sins, says this about these people, 'They seldom make mistakes, because they never put themselves in a position where they are not complete masters of the situation... they have died to joy and pain and thus feeling.

' One can not be educated without experiencing the joys and pains of life, this would leave nothing to learn from. One aspect of being considered educated that is imperative is the ability to communicate, or in some situations, vent his or her feelings in a positive matter. This demonstrates pure knowledge of ones own spirit. One of the best ways to do this is through an artistic medium.

This is the main reason why so many artists are referred to as ingenious. These people not only display feelings constructively, they do it in such an interestingly radical way that they invoke emotional responses from their admirers. Art has the ability to express feelings better than any words from 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 hero's and leaders.

This is also the biggest reason that so many people admire them and strive to be like them.