I agree with Frazzled UBM, Oubliette, nonjwspouse, jgnat, revdip2000, James Brown, Caedes, Oh Gawd, DesirousOfChange, done4good, and any others who said education is important.
OP questions: How educated are you? And how great is your vocabularly ect ....?
I consider myself highly educated, not because of formal education, but because I love to learn and have the capacity to do so. Vocabulary is not as important to me as are logic, comprehension, grammar, mechanics of language, etc. So I’ve never really tried to increase my vocabulary; I’d rather study grammar or linguistics or logic.
Education to me is extremely important. Arrogance and whether a person is likeable are separate issues. Uneducated people and/or people of lower intelligence can be just as arrogant or more so than educated ones.
If a person is going to be arrogant, then he might as well be educated. I couldn’t stand the men in my congregation who were know-it-alls, but knew nothing and those were who tried to display intellect, but were just idiots.
I think that all humans should strive to be educated for the right reasons. I admire and am fascinated with the great intellectuals in history. The Renaissance fascinates me. To me, education – seeking, learning, understanding – is one of the things that should define humans. And I do judge people on the basis of education – not whether they have degrees, but whether they have the desire to learn and they act on that desire.
One of my favorite quotes is this: “An educated man is one who is aware of what he does not know.” That is so true. A lot of people (if not most people) don't know what they don't know. The more one learns, the more he is aware of what all there is that he does not know. The old hillbilly might think he knows it all; he knows everything about the mountain he lives on, but he’s never been off the mountain, so he’s not aware of what all is beyond his tiny realm. Therefore, he’s uneducated.
My mother thinks that ninth grade algebra is advanced math. Some years ago, my mother’s cousin told me, upon finding out that I liked and did well in math, that I should be an accountant. So neither has any clue what math is all about. The more I learn about math, the more I realize how much I don’t know. I am more and more aware of how much there is that I don’t know. I realize there are fields of math like topology and number theory concerning which I’m ignorant, but my mother and her cousin don’t even know such fields exist, so they’re uneducated.
I want to know and understand it all – not to show off, but because I enjoy learning and knowing and I find education and knowledge vastly useful and stimulating. I’d want to be educated if I were the only person on earth – if there were nobody else that could even know that I was educated.
I hear some people say “nobody will ever use that” referring to some type of math or something. I’m thinking how do you know when you don’t even understand it. I have found my knowledge of math, science, language, etc. to be vastly useful, but even if it wasn’t, I still find it just satisfying to have. [Here’s a math problem I encountered the other day that exemplifies the use of some of the math that people say one will never use: I had about a gallon of gas and oil mixed at a 50:1 ratio for my string trimmer. I needed fuel for my chain saw, but the mixture for it should be 40:1. I poured 8 ounces of the 50:1 mix in a cup and needed to know how much oil to add to make it 40:1. That dang math is useful.]
To me, education doesn’t have to be acquired in a formal setting. I’ve known a number of people who graduated from college, but couldn’t half a recipe (didn’t know what half of a third was) or who had no clue what the difference between an adverb and adjective was. One can teach himself, so there’s no excuse to me for one’s not being educated (unless he legitimately just doesn’t have the brain power).
I’m the type that wants to know the “why” of everything. For example, I want to learn to weld. But I don’t want to just have somebody show me how. I want to know what’s going on at the molecular level. I want to know metallury. I want to know microscopically what’s going on when metals are annealed and tempered and hardened. Knowledge is power. It opens up doors. It can save lives.
So, again, I think education is vastly important.
