Learned not educated #

Being educated doesn’t necessarily make you learned.

Educated is defined by a diploma, license, or document certifying that a specific level of formally recognized level of education has been reached. Learned is the skill of acquiring knowledge continuously applied. The learned individual is a crafstperson if their craft was knowledge.

One never reaches the end of knowledge but can obtain a level of education. Sometimes the pursuit of an education is also the pursuit of mastery, but the pursuit of knowledge by the learned is always the pursuit of mastery of knowledge.

This is my opinion. Too much weight is given to obtaining a specific “rank” in education. This is poorly correlated with real-world skill, knowledge, or ability. In a similar fashion that SAT scores, IQ tests, or other measures of “smarts” are poorly correlated with future success in any particular domain, so too is having achieved a certain level of education. “Grit” is a much more reliable predictor of future success. Studies show this.

Sometimes the yardstick we have is the yardstick we measure against despite it’s dubious accuracy. Education is our yardstick that has been agreed upon by social contract. But it is a poor yardstick. If anything level of education is more closely correlated with financial opportunity or we could go so far as to say the “class” one is born into. Of course there are outliers but overall the statistics are relevant. Studies also show this.

Why haven’t we come up with a better yardstick? Because measuring knowledge is hard. If one reaches a high enough level of knowledge and skill in a particular domain, they may reach a level at which only their peers can even judge the weight or correctness of their contributions to the domain. This is the premise supporting peer reviewed scientific journals and other sources at the frontiers of knowledge. At the frontiers of knowledge verification and agreement by experts is almost as hard as generating the knowledge itself.

But, in the areas where knowledge is well-troden why haven’t we been able to come up with a better yardstick? What if verifiable proof that knowledge had