What does it mean to be educated?
People are shaped by the education they receive, the social experiences they gain, and the culture they grow up in. My mother is one of the most educated people I know. She has been teaching Chinese Literature in a public school for more than thirty years.
While she has rich knowledge of her subject matter, she is also aware that there is a lot she does not know. She is a lifelong learner. Whenever she has time, she reads and learns new things, such as how to use a smartphone and how to make a video on the computer. Though she is in her mid-fifties, she has an open mind toward new ideas. As Aristotle said, entertaining a thought without accepting it is the mark of an educated person. Moreover, she has good moral qualities; she is polite and patient to everyone she interacts with, and she is humble and modest. Above all, she has empathy, the ability to understand and feel what another person is experiencing.
Entertaining a thought without accepting it is the mark of an educated person. ------ Aristotle
In my opinion, empathy is extremely important for teachers because they need to know students’ needs in order to help them. Take me for example; as a Chinese girl in my late twenties, I had the most enviable job in China and was leading a stable life in a small town. But why I quitted my stable job and moved to Canada to be a graduate student? Everyone in my family was against my decision, except for my mother. She understood that it was time to let me go. I was still young and deserved the chance to pursue what I wanted. She was the only one who supported me from the beginning to the end. She has rich knowledge in her field, a willingness to pursue lifelong learning, an open mind, good moral qualities, and empathy. I am truly thankful to her for being a role model for what it truly means to be educated.
When I asked my mother what she thinks it means to be educated, she answered me with five key qualities: critical thinking ability, open-mindedness (tolerance), perseverance, accountability, and lifelong learning ability. However, she doesn’t think that having a good academic performance inevitably leads to being an educated person. Coincidentally, three of those qualities also appeared on the list our group summed up in class: lifelong learning, concentration, open-mindedness, morality, and accountability. Great minds think alike!
The educated person in my statement has rich knowledge in a certain field, a willingness to pursue lifelong learning, an open mind, good moral qualities, and empathy, while the educated person (my mother) believes critical thinking ability, open-mindedness (tolerance), perseverance, accountability, and lifelong learning ability are important. My classmates share a similar idea with her. Taking all of those into consideration, my ideal qualities for an educated person are open-mindedness, accountability, lifelong learning ability, morality, and empathy. These qualities are like the North Star, a compass pointing for a journey to the destinations, and the Northfield is the educational aim, to be an educated person (Fenstermacher, 2000).
My ideal qualities for an educated person are open-mindedness, accountability, lifelong learning ability, morality, and empathy.
I have been rethinking the aim of education several times, since Professor Pamer asked which of the three fundamental ideas in Kieran Egan (2001)’s article - socialisation, Plato’s Academic ideal, and Rousseau’s development theory - we were in favor of. I struggled and finally chose to stand for the second idea. It turned out that only three of the twenty-one students in the class chose the second idea, including me, while over half chose the third and the rest the first. Honestly, I am not totally in agreement that the prime goal of education is to shape the young’s minds through a set of required disciplines. This is actually what I have always struggled with and been confused about.
The school I previously worked for is the best and largest public school in my city. It faces a lot of pressure to stay excellent. The education ministry has high expectations for the school’s academic performance, which means each teacher has a lot of pressure to improve students’ studies and grades. This is the paramount assessment of a teacher’s work. Meanwhile, teachers are busy carrying out their research and projects, while they await orders to help students with their studies and “babysit” them 24/7. At the end of the day, elementary school teachers are like the wheels in a top speed Formula One race, working overtime and being busy with “education” all day. I started to wonder why education had become this way. To figure out why this has happened to education and how to fix it, that is one of the reasons why I am pursuing the master of education program in the best education department in Canada.
Reference
Egan, K. (2001). Why education is so difficult and contentious. Teachers College Record, 103 (6), (pp. 923-941).
Fenstermacher, G. D. (2000, July). What is the difference between the North Star and Northfield? How educational goals and ideals become confused. Invited presentation to the Summer Institute of School Superintendents, Macinak, Michigan. Available at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gfenster/northstar6ss.PDF
© Wenyi Gong 2017
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