---
title: "After Reading This, Are You Still Sure You Are Truly Educated?"
description: "Richard Levin, who served as president of Yale University for 20 years, once said, \"If a student graduates from Yale with some very specialized knowledge and skills, that is the biggest failure of Yale education.\" True education is about the spirit of freedom, civic responsibility, and lofty aspirations, as well as critical independent thinking, constant self-awareness, the foundation for lifelong learning, and the ability to achieve happiness. Education does not teach knowledge and skills, but it enables people to be competent in any discipline and profession."
author: "斯黛肥"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2015-09-16"
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# After Reading This, Are You Still Sure You Are Truly Educated?

> Richard Levin, who served as president of Yale University for 20 years, once said, "If a student graduates from Yale with some very specialized knowledge and skills, that is the biggest failure of Yale education." True education is about the spirit of freedom, civic responsibility, and lofty aspirations, as well as critical independent thinking, constant self-awareness, the foundation for lifelong learning, and the ability to achieve happiness. Education does not teach knowledge and skills, but it enables people to be competent in any discipline and profession.

Richard Levin, who served as president of Yale University for 20 years, once said, "If a student graduates from Yale with some very specialized knowledge and skills, that is the biggest failure of Yale education." True education is about the spirit of freedom, civic responsibility, and lofty aspirations, as well as critical independent thinking, constant self-awareness, the foundation for lifelong learning, and the ability to achieve happiness.

**Education does not teach knowledge and skills, but it enables people to be competent in any discipline and profession**

Richard Charles Levin is a world-renowned educator who served as president of Yale University from 1993 to 2013. The last Yale president to serve a full 20 years was Arthur Twining Hadley, who took office in 1899.

Richard Levin once said: If a student graduates from Yale with some very specialized knowledge and skills, that is the biggest failure of Yale education. Because, he believed, specialized knowledge and skills are things that students need to learn and master after graduation, according to their own wishes, and that is not the task of Yale education.

So what is the use of university education?

In his collection of speeches, "The Work of the University," Richard Levin mentioned that Yale is committed to cultivating leaders. In Levin's view, the core of undergraduate education is general education, which is to cultivate students' ability to think critically and independently, and to lay the foundation for lifelong learning.

The English term for general education is liberal education, which is education for freedom, the free nourishment of the mind. Its core is the spirit of freedom, civic responsibility, and lofty aspirations.

Freely develop personal potential, freely choose the direction of study, not be burdened by utilitarianism, set direction for the growth of life, and contribute to society and the progress of humanity.

This is the purpose of Yale education in Levin's mind.

As John Henry Newman, author of "The Idea of a University," said: "Only education can make a person have a clear and conscious understanding of his own views and judgments. Only education can enable him to articulate his views with reason, express them with persuasion, and inspire with power. Education enables him to see the world as it is, to get to the point, to untangle the mess of thoughts, to see through specious sophistry, and to ignore irrelevant details. Education enables a man to discharge with confidence any post, and to master any subject with ease."

**Education does not change the living environment, but it can change the way people think**

In 2005, the late American novelist David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College.

At the beginning of the speech, he told a small story: Two young fish meet an old fish. The old fish greets them: "Good morning, kids. How's the water?" The two young fish swim on for a while, and finally, one of them can't help asking the other: "What is 'water'?"

The speech mentioned that an adult's life requires getting up early, rushing to the office, dealing with 8-10 hours of challenging work, then going to the supermarket, cooking, relaxing for a while, and then going to bed early. Because the next day, it all starts again.

People easily form unconscious inertia in such a life: unconsciously checking phones, speeding up life, getting bogged down in trivial daily chores, ignoring people and things around them, being indifferent, angry, complaining... without realizing it.

Just like the story at the beginning, having lived in "water" for too long, they no longer know what water is.

Wallace said in his speech that the purpose of education is not to learn knowledge, but to acquire a way of thinking—in the tedious and boring life, always maintain clear self-awareness, not being dragged along by messy, unconscious life, but life is controlled by "me."

Learning to think, to choose, to have faith and freedom—this is the purpose of education, and also the ability to achieve happiness.

**Education can make you live happily; happiness depends on conscious ways of thinking**

Harvard University's "Happiness Course" is popular worldwide. The professor who teaches this course, Tal Ben-Shahar, believes that happiness depends on your conscious way of thinking, and he summarized the following 12 points of consciously obtaining happiness:

1. Keep asking yourself questions. Every question opens the door to self-exploration, and then what is worthy of your belief will appear in your real life.
2. Believe in yourself. How? By solving problems and accepting challenges each time, by telling yourself through visual imagination that you can do it, and also believing in others.
3. Learn to accept failure, otherwise you will never grow.
4. Accept that you are imperfect. Life is not a straight line that keeps rising, but a rising curve.
5. Allow yourself to have normal human emotions, including both positive and negative emotions.
6. Recording life can help you.
7. Think positively about all problems you encounter, and learn to be grateful. Gratitude can bring the purest joy to humanity.
8. Simplify life. Quality over quantity. Learn to say "no" to things you don't want.
9. The first element of happiness is intimate relationships. This is a natural human need, so make efforts for long-lasting intimate relationships.
10. Get enough rest and exercise.
11. There are three levels of doing things: work, career, and mission. Find your mission in this world.
12. Remember: only when you are happy can you make others happy. The best way to educate children is to be honest parents.

**Jesus and Teachers**

He never attended school for a day; why is his influence so profound?

The unique insights of the above three people on education can give us a lot of inspiration. In human history, there is a person who never attended school for a day, came from a humble background, and yet had an extremely important influence on human culture, thought, and lifestyle. He is Jesus Christ.

In Jesus' life, we can see that he possessed the three qualities of education:

1. The ability to think critically and independently. If you are familiar with the Gospels, you can find that Jesus was never a person who followed the crowd. Every word he spoke challenged the common values and behaviors of people of that era. His purpose was not to be unconventional, but to point people to the right path.
2. Maintaining clear self-awareness at all times. Jesus was very clear about his life goal, which was to fulfill God's redemption and save people who were deeply trapped in sin. Therefore, in his 33-year life journey, he encountered countless slanders and attacks, as well as contempt and exclusion from many people. Jesus' life was full of ups and downs. But he did not worry about this because he knew what his ultimate purpose was. This clear self-awareness is actually a powerful weapon for everyone to resist going with the flow.
3. Happiness depends on conscious ways of thinking. In Jesus' life, the light of wisdom shines everywhere. Every word he spoke recorded in the Gospels tells people the true meaning of life, and that true happiness in life means rejoicing in God.

**-END-**

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