Raising Kids, Becoming Educated

SOME FOLKS, when they hit eighteen, focus on work, and family. Some focus on education, mainly formal. If anything'll keep you from pursuing a formal education, or an informal one, its work and family. If you don't get married and have kids, you have a lot more time for thinking, for study and research, and a lot of other things, including money. Either way, you're on your way to the top. It takes all kinds, as they say. Telling the truth is never an insult. There's no shame in not having a spouse and kids, and no shame in not having a good education. The important thing is to know yourself, know the truth about yourself, and embrace it, while looking for ways to improve yourself. Actions, and lack of actions, have surprisingly widespread consequences, like ripples in a pond. Whatever education you do and do not have has an impact on your attitudes, thinking, beliefs, decisions, and actions. Intelligence and education are two very different things; one can have intelligence without much education, but a good ecudation requires and reveals a reasonable level of intelligence. We are rapidly entering a golden age of education in which everyone, whether married, with, or without kids and job, can have a good education. People form strong opinions, and take strong, influential actions, regardless of their intelligence and education. And that's when a lack of education can become tragic. That's when people start going, poorly educated, astray, ingnoring what is obvious and embracing the absurd. Over the past couple of centuries, thousands of people have staunchly claimed to believe that the Earth is flat, because it says so in the Bible. Millions of Americans still believe that the Bible is the absolutely perfect Word of God. People didn't always believe this nonsense: the idea got started some centuries ago, caught on, and spread like poorly educated wild fire. So much for embracing the absurd. Then, we have the deniers, deniers of the obvious truths, such as evolution and man made global warming. Those are just two examples. Interestingly, often times the people who believe nonesense about the Bible are the ones who deny the obvious about the real world. And yes, these are the folks you wish would get themselves just a wee bit better educated, maybe when their kids are grown and out of the house.