Criteria for an 'educated' person

First, the student should have enough knowledge of his or her cultural tradition to know how it got to be the way it is. This involves both political and social history, on the one hand, as well as the mastery of some of the great philosophical and literary texts of the culture on the other. It involves reading not only texts that are of great value, like those of Plato, but many less valuable that have been influential, such as the works of Marx. For the United States, the dominant tradition is, and for the foreseeable future, will remain the European tradition. The United States is, after all, a product of the European Enlightenment. However, you do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. Works from other cultural traditions need to be studied as well.

If these two streams, both the political-social and the philosophical-literary, are well organized and well taught, the claims of the various minorities should have their place. Intelligently taught social and political histories of Europe and the United States, for example, should recognize the history of all of the major components of European and American society, including those that have been treated unjustly. It is important, however, to get rid of the ridiculous notion that there is something embarrassing or lamentable about the fact that most of the prominent political and intellectual leaders of our culture over the past two thousand years or so have been white males. This is just a historical fact whose causes should be explored and understood. To deny it or attempt to suppress the works of such thinkers is not simply racism, it is unintelligent.

Second, you need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world. This means, at a minimum, that you need to know enough about physics and chemistry to understand how the physical world is constructed. This would also include at least a smattering of knowledge of the general and special theories of relativity, and an understanding of why quantum mechanics is so philosophically challenging. Furthermore, at a minimum, you must have enough biology to understand the Darwinian revolution, and to understand recent developments in genetics and microbiology.

Third, you need to know enough about how society works so that you understand what a trade cycle is, or how interest rates will affect the value of the currency, for example. In short, you need to have some knowledge of the subject matter that used to be called political economy.

Fourth, you need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

Fifth, you need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.

By jove, I believe I’ve found the perfect description of Obama, those who voted for him and those with whom he has surrounded himself (not to mention Algore and HIS Kool-Aid drinkers).

“(…) the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.” — P.B. Medawar

obama is in NO SENSE “educated”.

He didn’t know that Alaska was a territory, not a state, during WWII.

He didn’t know how many states are in the United States.

Any piece of writing that can be DEFINITIVELY attributed to him is incoherent in style and devoid of substance. (Those two books of “his” were written by someone else.)

He NEVER wrote a scholarly paper in his life, despite being president of the Harvard Law Review and a (lower-level) faculty member at the elite University of Chicago.

How obama ever got into Columbia University or Harvard Law School is among the many, many unknowns of his life history. We do not have his college transcripts. obama was such an indifferent student at Occidental College (on drugs, etc.) and probably not such a good student at Columbia, so even affirmative action does not explain how he got into such prestigious schools. There is at least some evidence for a Saudi connection, which would explain a lot.

The REAL failure of the educated classes is that so many of them fell for obama, gushing that he was the second coming of Lincoln/JFK/Bobby Kennedy/Martin Luther King. The very worst is the militant Serb-hating “human rightser” Martha Minow (now Dean of Harvard Law School) who saw him as a future President when he was in her classes as a student. Well, Minow was “prophetic” in that he would be President, but perhaps she helped her “prophecy” along, together with her muslim friends.

Someday, the truth about the meteoric rise of the muslim communist obama will come out—I hope sooner rather than later!!!!

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