So You Think You Are Educated?

By Louis Kakoutis

Most educated people nowadays, do not know enough about learning to be able to develop their own opinions. No doubt, they like to think they are educated, but people who routinely say things which are too false to be believed by anybody who retains any capacity at all for critical thought, betray ignorance.

We learn by experimentation, by observation, by communication & instruction, by contrast & comparison, by intuition, by practice & experience and by analogy.

Truth is simply the most objective and the most credible version of something we have learned. Needless to say, the facts which expose the truth are logically independent of what we believe. We can falsely believe the world is flat until our personal beliefs and experiences are challenged and expanded. Socrates called the truth, "correctness of opinion."

Different interpretations or perceptions about the shape of the earth merely prove that the facts which have shaped the mental state of one person are are not the same as the ones that have shaped the mental state of another.

Truth can be many things; it can be a shared relationship, an organized perception, an intuitive judgement, a lucky guess ...but it can never be a falsehood like the claim that the earth is flat.

The ultimate goal of learning and the pursuit of truth is to develop understanding. Depth of knowledge and experience determines the degree of understanding.

We can all agree with the claim that the world is round, whether it is because our parents or teachers told us so, we read it in a book, we viewed pictures and movies, studied a globe or orbited the earth in a space capsule -clearly, the depth of certainty and understanding will vary depending upon how each of us has studied, confirmed or thought about the claim that the earth is round.

There is enormous misunderstanding about what truth is and what it is not, and that is because at our core, we are insecure, social animals who gravitate, not towards the conviction that we are intelligent enough to find the truth ourselves, but towards the need to adhere to some authority who does all the thinking for us. "Schools of thought" grant the appearance of intelligence, and in many respects, the intelligence is clearly apparent. But when they advocate dogmatic propositions and demand homogeneous compliance, these schools that are supposed to be beacons of light become temples of ignorance because they unilaterally dismiss any truth that violates their adopted statements.

To develop a very clear understanding about what the truth is and what it is not, you ought to READ THIS ! That is what the very best and the very brightest have said about the truth, and you ought to begin with the basic question: How did Abraham Lincoln determine the simple fact that a dog has four legs even though most lawyers practice the ability to claim otherwise? You will find the answer to that peculiar intrigue RIGHT HERE !