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You heard me, what is it that decides whether a person is educated or not.

I think he meant principals and personal values, among with manners, an educated person is not necessarily someone that went to college but someone that has the tools to developed in society and don't take advantage of them, a mix of personal values, principals and manners(in some places you still have to be white to be educated, even you have a Harvard degree).

I am seeing many great ideas here.

I do not think just because you are "school" educated that you are necicarilly educated.
There are people who excelled in high school, but since 90% of high school teachings are pointless, they are out of their league in the real world. So they head to college, but never leave. They stay in college getting more and more, higher and higher degrees for the simple reason that they can not handle the real world, so they stay in the safety of the school system.
They are not educated in "the real world". They are so extremly learned in school survival and fear leaving its safety in which they always excelled. So therefore, those with high degrees are not necicarilly educated.

@bold.. I think what you're talking about is 'experience'. I think there is a big difference between knowledge and experience. experience is putting knowledge into practice. we generally get our knowledge thru book learning. some people are lucky enough to have 'hands on' training, those are the ones who dont have to wait to apply the knowledge they've learned in the classroom, they can go right out and glean some entry level experience in the real world while in the process of learning the knowledge. but you're right.. there are some people who hideout in the school system for as long as they can because they're afraid of growing up and accepting the responsibilities that come with adulthood and contributing to the society they belong to.

educated... well I can safely say that i agree in that there is no final answer, however i dont believe that simply having a degree ( be it from hogwarts or harvards ) makes you educated, it quite possibly makes you knowledgeble...

I base this on my own experiences thruout my teens and early 20's, i only have the most basic education (1-9th grade), by american standards i had an average of something like a b+, but lets face it, the first 9 years of school is utterly pointless when it comes to the question of education, reading/writing and math are but bare neccesities.
now in my years of cutting loose ( read smoking weed and drinking everyday ) i often ( not surprisingly ) ran across people who thought of me as an imbecile due to my lack of degrees, job and home...
well it just so happens that to this day i still havent had a conversation in which i wasnt superior to the one trying to lecture me...
I've shot down psycology students that went to universities, philosofi students and even showed off a few politicians about whatever subject they bring up...
My general knowledge of history, culture, religion and litterature surpasses the ones that tried to discuss such things with me and so far i havent failed at making happy people "realize" the wrongs of the world ( even accidently broke a few down into depression ).
the only thing i've done to obtain this knowledge is paying a bit of attention whenever something of value is mentioned in movies and comics..
almost All of my education comes from fictional stories and as such i dont think there is such a thing as "being educated" its all about how good you are at BS'ing others or how smart you can make yourself sound...
im dumb as a doornail but havent had to back down from a discussion yet ^^

I think you have to know how to communicate, which usually does(but doesn't have to) tie in with school. If people can understand the message youre trying to send, and if you can make them see it from you're own point of view, then I'd think that you're educated. School education in my eyes isn't as good as worldly education, like going to another country, or just walking around major cities seeing landmarks, and learning about the world from experiences, rather than books.

I'm not sure, a good many valid points have been brought up here. A good many 'educated' people are merely people who can BS well enough to make themselves seem knowledgeable on different points, but then again there are a good few intelligent people who observe and thus learn that way. I don't believe intelligence can be gaged by education level, nor much else. Is my grandmother an idiot because she dropped out of high school to help look after her many younger brothers and sisters? The matter of education is very strange to nail down, though by book learning even an educated person may not be much so. For instance, I graduated in the top ten percent of my high school class with a fairly high GPA, but I'm horribly inept at most mathematical equations and history? Forget it. I remember more of my Government and Economics teacher yelling at the rest of my class instead of teaching than I do about checks and balances. I strongly believe I only passed that class with the highest grade of everyone simply because I didn't hassle the teacher much, except for the time I told her if she wouldn't teach me something I'd rather be sleeping (since it was my first class of the day and I'm not a morning person) so I put my head down and took a nap.

An educated person is plain and simply.

Someone who has bine educated.


I.E they have gone to school and have bine taught up to and past a high school diploma.