#2

An educated person should...
#2. Understand and evaluate their own and other's decisions.
"Understand and evaluate..." To understand beliefs and values that you accept in your life, you call on reserves first. An example would be: Your frame of reference. This has been discussed in earlier blog messages. In your "frame of reference", you have amassed a tremendous amount of "education", that you call on everyday. It depends upon how diligent you have been in your life to accumulate a good "stockpile", of information. It is good information if you have received it, hashed and rehashed it, and accepted it into your existence as a belief or value that you stand behind. For instance, if your parents were/are conservatives, you have been privy to their discussions and beliefs and have accepted many into your "frame". To you, that becomes the way you look at current happenings and reports. After many challenges to those beliefs, you feel comfortable with some and uncomfortable with others. This is now starting into the "evaluate" portion. You need to see how strongly you believe in those comfortable ones, what makes you comfortable, and why you feel uncomfortable with the ones you can't believe in--and why. You are now starting to weigh what you can support and what is needed for that support and why you can't support an item. One of the most polarizing issues is abortion. If your religious beliefs feel that the mother should carry the fetus full term--NO MATTER WHAT, then that is what you would choose. However, if you believe that the mother's rights to free choice, supercedes the rights of the fetus, then you will desire a mother the choice to have an abortion or not.
New evidence:
Once you have established your value system, you then need to keep current on all the latest technological,current events, local, national and worldwide, Congressional events, your federal political subdivisions (House of Representatives) and Senators for your state , State government members and city government representatives. You should be able to read about an event, enter or not enter it into your frame of reference and be able to stand up and voice an opinion on that event. You also need to keep current on world events and be able to support or not support what is going on and be able to get involvled in discussion about the way you feel about what is going on. How does this effect you? The George W. Bush Presidency made so many "errors" that the public rose up and elected a Barak Obama as President. The people were so insensed that they took their "well-formulated opinions" and put them into action by electing a new political party to the Presidency with new ideas, similar to their own. Those original opinions were ideas that people saw didn't work, they accepted new ideas to alter their "frame of reference" and put that new altered opinion into action.