I grew up in Hungary in a very little town during the second world war. Elementary school I made in this little town but for middle and high school, I had to go very far from this hometown. I like to go to school. I learned so many new things, but then we were invaded from Russia and I had to go with my parents and leave Hungary and I could not study anymore. From now on, I had to work. I met my husband in Venezuela. He was also an immigrant from Czechoslovakia. We always wanted the best education for our children. All went to college. One is lawyer, one is pharmacist, and one is college professor. My husband said always what you have here, nobody can take it away from you. Hi, I'm Jan Barton, I'm a business professor at Emory University. For the last couple of decades, I've been teaching both graduate and undergraduate students how to analyze the business performance and make investment decisions. As a professor, I've spent quite a lot of time thinking carefully about how to be an effective teacher and help my students get the most out of their college education. But I'm going to let you in on a little secret that is sort of embarrassing. See, I've spent pretty much all of my life either educating myself or educating someone else. But it wasn't until a couple of months ago that I was actually forced to think more intentionally and more carefully about what it means to be educated. That's when I read Tara Westover's New York Times number one best-selling memoir, Educated. And a few weeks later, I got to meet and chat with her when she came to Emory to share her thoughts. In that book, she tells her story of growing up in a survivalist family in the mountains of Idaho and during both emotional and physical abuse. Her family was isolated from mainstream society, so she never received a formal education. She was 17 years old when she set foot for the first time in a classroom. She taught herself enough math and grammar to get into college and eventually she earned a PhD from Cambridge. The book tells her personal struggle to become educated in her own terms. What seems clear to me from reading Tara's memoir and from my own experience and from talking with other people is that there are different ways of being educated. That they vary across your life and that your view of education is greatly influenced by your environment. So my view of education is pretty much a reflection of my upbringing. You met my mom at the beginning of this video, her views greatly influenced my own view of education. And pretty sure that my view and my husband's view of education would also influence in one way or another the choices that our son Alex will make some day about his own education. In this video, you will meet them and other regular people like you and me who will share their views of what it means to them to be educated. Along the way, I want you to start thinking about what it means to be educated from your point of view. What are you doing to become and stay educated, what seems to work for you that you might want to share with us. And what advice would you give to others especially the next generation for being more intentional about being educated and staying educated. So let's hear what other people have to say. Let's start out with Maya, a high school senior about to go on to college. Maya is my son's tutor. >> I just applied to college actually a couple months ago, and the decisions are really in, so it's scary. I'm very interested in debate, I love to argue. So of course, my career path will definitely be law. The difference between elementary to middle to high school is the ability to expound upon what you actually want to learn. In elementary school and middle school, they're telling you, they're saying this is what we think every student needs to learn. These are the standards for each and every student, doesn't matter what you actually want to learn or what they think you need. It's more so about what the system thinks that you need to learn to be a member of society. And so to high school, I realized that you get to pick that for yourself that no one can tell you what you want to learn or what you have to learn. And so it gave me the freedom to pick what classes I want to take and to truly dive into the topics that are interesting to me. Part of education is to understand why and then part of it is to be able to apply it to the world in which you live in. So I see a lot of struggles that people have is that you might be a genius but can you use what you've learned to make any impact in the world? And so I think part of it is that most people have one or the other, right? You have the drive and the motivation and the desire to see change but you don't actually have the knowledge and will. And so, I think it's very important that to be educated comes with both. If I had to go back in time and advice myself about education, I would tell myself to definitely start earlier. I think it's never too young to learn. I definitely could have or should have read a lot more to understand again why things are the way they are. >> I also want you to meet Sonia, an administrative assistant at Emory. Sonia didn't finish college, but she did everything she could to make sure her son would. She's one of the first people I go to for wise advice on pretty much anything. >> No one really was educated in my family, but they have big hearts. And so I grew up with a lots of love and lots of care. In high school, I was the high school queen and the captain of majorette and I was very smart in school. To be educated for me, means to have options. It means that you allowed yourself to give yourself a gift. It means that no one could take it away from you is the information that you have, you can take it and do whatever you want to do with it. It means being skilled and trained in areas that you would not just get on a normal job. And I think being educated means that I wouldn't feel like I would have to worry about myself financially, like it would be a tool that I could take and be whatever I want to be. If I could go back in time, what would I tell little Sonia about being educated, I would have followed my dream, my passion. I wanted to be an interior designer and someone told me that I would not make any money and I don't know why that just stopped me. And from there, I went on and got married and life just happened. So if I had to go back in time, I would have gone directly from high school to college and finished. I have a son, his name is Hans Petty. He's 32 years old and he is a phenomenal person. He's very educated and he loves what he does. Now, he is a high school teacher but his background is in chemistry and biology. When he was a little boy, we were living in an area that didn't have the best schools. Once I put him in the right environment just to see him sore. So I made sure he got in a great education and that he got to it very well, and his confidence level became off the chart. So when he told me he wanted to go to college and it was no, I was not taking no for an answer, he was going. So we work very hard to prepare him because he wasn't ready and then once he figured out how he best learned, then I promised him that if you go to school, I'll make sure I can finance it. I think what it was is I want it better for him, just to have options to do whatever he wants to do. And that was a big keyword in our house, what are going to be our options. >> I want you to meet my husband Steven know, he was a successful accountant, went back to school to retrain himself so he could become an HIV healthcare provider. He's also a pretty cool guy. >> Growing up in my family, education was never really a priority. In my immediate family, I was the first one to be in a four-year college. And so the fact that I was in school was enough. There wasn't the priority to be successful or the priority to actually figure out what you wanted to learn, and I was a very poor student as a result of that. That changed for me when I was around people who actually cared about their education and I learned from them the Importance of being educated and what that could do for you. And I realized that I needed get my act together if I wanted to be successful. So education became a priority for me at that point. Even after realizing that education was important, I still struggled a bit to figure out what I wanted to do in terms of my own education. Initially, I studied accounting which was a great job. I worked as a CPA for public accounting firm once I graduated but the work didn't excite me. There was no passion for what I did there. Around the same time, my mom became seriously ill and what I realized was I wanted something more in the caring profession that allowed me to interact and have a deeper meaning in people's lives. And so healthcare became an option for me at that point because I saw personally the impact that my mom's healthcare providers were having on us and I wanted to be able to do that for people as well. So once I decided to become a physician assistant, it was a complete retraining for me to be able to move from business to medicine. None of my educational background had any of the sciences, so I needed to retrain myself. I went back and took undergraduate biology and chemistry courses for two years to get prerequisites to be able to do my program. And as part of the physician assistant requirements as well, you have to have direct patient care. So I worked as a nurse assistant essentially learning medicine from the bottom up. I currently work as a physician assistant with an infectious diseases practice doing a job I love. I work in HIV STI medicine and conduct clinical trials that are office runs for investigational medications. But my education isn't done and I still have to constantly keep myself on top of new developments and new treatment options. I do that both by reading journals, medical blogs online and attending CME conferences out of town where I have to travel to get my education. If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice about education, it would be to figure out what makes you tick. Try to look at what you like to do, the things you want to do, the skill sets that are required to do those things, and then match that up with what you would need to be able to do those types of jobs. I was behind with that and as a result, it took me a while to find the job that I love but had I been a little bit more on top of that. I think I really would have been able to do what I love a lot sooner. >> Let's hear now from Kristy, the vice dean of Emory University's Business School and a very dear friend of mine. >> My parents were both educators. My father was a college professor and my mom was a high school principal. The concept of being educated is quite nebulous. I don't think it's a matter of going to school. I think to be truly educated means to know the own boundaries of what you know. So, this might sound a little silly but in the movie and the book Yentl, Barbra Streisand has my favorite line of all time, which is the more I live, the more I learn, the more I learn, the more I realize the less I know. And to be truly educated is to get to that the less I know point. My view of education clearly came from my parents and my older siblings. My mom in particular came from a very, very humble background, as in no shoes in the summer kind of background. But she read always, she was filled with curiosity and she continued to want to know more and more and more about this world and to educate herself both formally and informally. I think that changing places, changing positions changing jobs is the best way to stay educated because you're forced out of your ruts, you're forced to think about things differently. To stay educated without changing jobs or without changing positions means being fully aware of what you don't know. It's easy when you're staying in one place to start feeling like an expert but the truly educated person understands that you don't know anything and when you die, you won't know anything compared to all of the knowledge that is out there. And so just being fully aware all the time of how little you know is how you stay educated. My mom is my model there because she always was reading books and discovering things and just one thing after another, you're late in her life, she became interested in aromatherapy. And she started reading about all these plants and what they heal and I would constantly get notes in the mail that maybe you should try this for this little problem you're having. I would give my younger self the same advice that I try to keep giving myself now, is to not worry about how well I perform. But instead, enjoy and embrace the learning process. I think if we want to be very honest about it, higher ed is sometimes vocational. Higher ed allows people to reach a higher standard of living and to accomplish things in their lives that they couldn't do without it. A university like Emory has an even higher calling, while certainly our students find ways to have a vocation here. We are teaching people much, much more deeply how to think, how to lead, how to change the world. And I think it's amazing, I think there will always need to be a strong connection between a faculty guide and the student. Now, that connection might be online, that connection might be between a student in a classroom and a hologram in the front of the room. But that connection is the essence of formal education. >> And to wrap it up, here's my mom again. >> I'm retired now and I'm almost 90 years old. And now I can learn almost anything I want. For example, I learned to use the iPad. Now I can FaceTime with my friends, with my family around the whole world. For me to be educated means the everything. >> You made some wonderful people in my life who have interesting stories and great insight about being educated. Now, I want to hear from you. What does it mean to you to be educated? What are you doing to stay educated, what seems to work for you that you can share with us to help us be more educated. And if you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself about becoming and staying educated? And if I can challenge you a bit more, how about you ask the same questions to five people in your life? Ask them to share their stories about education. You'll be surprised to find out how inspiring they will be.
