Well-Educated or Well-Read?

What’s the difference??

“Well-educated” suggests that there has to have been a lot of schooling involved. However, everybody knows people who have spent a lot of time in school and are clearly not particularly well-educated.

Being "well-read" is something that everybody can do with or without much school input. Though schools can clearly assist in providing a useful education, we must remember people like Abraham Lincoln, who was self-educated, having less than a year of elementary school, taught by itinerant teachers, and never attending college.?

He became well-read by reading every book he could get his hands on…Not children's books, but those that were written for the well-educated adults of his time.

His own knowledge grew using the language and substance of books, and his resulting mastery of the English language. His completely illiterate parents could not provide him much assistance. However, books helped establish the foundation that gave us his performance in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and famous creations like the Gettysburg Address.

Now, of course Lincoln was a unique case, but his life does demonstrate the undeniable potentials that books and reading can bring to expand life possibilities for anyone who has been taught to read a bit and (even more importantly) taught to love books.

Now, teaching children to “read proficiently” is clearly the single most important goal of American school curricula these days. However, teaching children to love books, and the reading of them (like Lincoln was) while becoming well-read, doesn’t seem to be that prominent a goal for most of our schools. That may have been the only thing that Lincoln was formally taught in his few months of formal schooling…that love of books and what they offered could carry him from the almost bookless woodlands of Kentucky and ultimately on into the United States presidency.?

In these busy days of focus for children on phonics and word reading above all and being given books chosen mostly for their carefully-leveled simplicity, one must wonder from where the next well-read Lincoln will come. Certainly that place will have taught that future Lincoln not just to translate text accurately into spoken language, but more importantly taught her / him how to discover the magic for the asking, from the millions upon millions of books on the shelves of the world’s free public libraries*.

• *Free public libraries are available to some extent in every country in the world, as well as everywhere online.