tokyokid wrote:
Jatopian wrote:
It's fairly rude of you to assume that everyone knows about the Titanic before seeing the movie, especially considering the state of education these days.
State of education? I consider it fairly rude that you assume that the education these days is bad. Hey, some of us are still in school, and have a great education. That's not saying that you didn't get a bad education (I think you probably got a great one!), but some kids these days still have a great education. I know its true that some areas don't have a great educational value, but it is not fair to insult the kids with good education, like me and the other student fourmers!
Sorry to continue the rave, but I had to make my point.
The definition of education is quite subjective, depending on who you are exactly. I suppose you could define it loosely as "
the process of learning facts, concepts, or physical abilities, or performing research into what is unknown (in order to end up doing the first three)"
.
Much of school-based education, if I'm not wrong, is generally fact-based, and more orientated towards subjects involving books and other resources where concrete facts may be found.
In response to Jatopian, you cannot equate the word "
education"
with "
general knowledge"
(i.e. in the sense of the current and recent media), since "
education"
covers the entire spectrum of all the types of knowledge you can gain, and "
general knowledge"
is only a subset of that spectrum. Also, what people define as "
general knowledge"
you "
should"
know is also highly subjective. For example, a person living in a rainforest may be more likely to know about the mating seasons of various forest animals, while a city-dweller may know more about the makes and models of different cars. In any case, it is wrong simply to dismiss someone because they know less than you about something, or they don't know something that
you expect them to know.
However, tokyokid, what I think Jatopian is trying to hint at (although for the wrong reason) is the fact that there are people who do not get enough of a particular type of "
education"
to be regarded as being "
normally educated"
in probably most societies. For example, in an English-speaking society, if you do not actually learn how to read, write or spell, then you might be considered "
uneducated"
in general, because you have not learned something that the society values as important. Another problem is that there are people who have this sort of credential, but who (either unknowingly or deliberately) claim to have knowledge that they do not have.
Now I don't want to start any flaming, and I certainly don't want to start attempting to define how people should be educated (that's for the people who study this kind of thing to work out, and politicians to control), but I do think that there should be an amount of understanding about the whole situation. We have to remember that knowledge may take many different forms, and that having a certain amount of a certain type is not necessarily indicative of what else you know (for example, I may know all about biochemical metabolic pathways in animals, but nothing about exactly why they work). You also can't assume anything about the importance of a piece of information without a context, and it is also wrong to assume that any context is necessarily better than any other. So, making simple blanket remarks about how "
good"
an "
education"
is, such as
"I had a great education", or
"the state of education today in children is poor" is purely a subjective thing by itself; you have to compare it to a standard or accepted reference for it to mean something (and even then, it could still be subjective).
So, I guess we all need to be considerate to each other. Not everyone knows everything, and we shouldn't expect that to be the case. You also can't say knowing or not knowing something is in itself "
good"
or "
bad"
; you need to think about what context you are putting the situation in, and whether such a context can be justified (again a subjective problem).
And to keep this on topic,
Spoiler alert!
Click here to view the secret text
×Puppies should only be eaten with ketchup
____________________________
Resident Medic/Mycologist
)
/dy