Education Teaches You How To Think?

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Education Teaches You How To Think
Education Teaches You How To Think The Old Main Building at The University of Texas at Austin in 1903 I grew up in a house of academics – both my parents were university professors with varying degrees of contributions as public intellectuals in their respective fields. In my upbringing, education wasn’t something you went to school and “did” for a couple of hours a day – it was and is a part of my identity, it shapes the way I think and feel and believe; education is a vocation.

Growing up in such an environment, the way I perceive education tends to differ from popular notions and messages of what education is, does, or should do for the individual. In the first place, what do we think when we hear, “education?” Many of us envision the process of schooling where we acquire knowledge in the classroom where our ability to retain, reproduce, and sometimes reframe that knowledge is tested.

And as we pursue higher levels of the education process, we move up a structural hierarchy where the knowledge acquisition process is more complex, and there is an expectation that beyond reproducing knowledge, we will adopt critical thinking of any acquired knowledge.

  1. This process, filled with instruction, and instructors, tests, and schedules, and deadlines, in a sense prepares us for organizing beyond the education institutions and systems.
  2. We have schedules and deadlines once we begin our lives in the so-called “real world.” We also have bosses who will have expectations and projects that will entail instructions and deadlines that we are required to meet.

In this way, education institutions do prepare us for work. And because of this, many deem that the sole intrinsic value of education is to prepare the individual to be a productive member of society in the workplace. Yet I find this positioning of education as solely a preparatory period for a working life inadequate.

  1. Education should teach us more than the rules and regulations of becoming a productive worker.
  2. Education should teach us how to engage in critical thinking and discourse of who we are as individuals and in relation to the community – the local one we find ourselves in, and the world at large.
  3. Education should provide us with the framework for how we choose to participate in society beyond the function of being a worker.

This participation should extend to how we arrive at our political and religious constructs, how we choose to consume products and services, and how we choose to interact on a daily basis with the world around us. It is true that Western hegemony has essentially framed the education process, and as a result, it has become an extension of capitalism.

And as an extension of capitalism, the process has become a means to a real outcome. In the liberal arts, we are taught that something is real if it is real in its consequences. And the consequences of education can be a job in our chosen field, a promotion, a title, etc. These are all good things and we should be allowed to want them.

But if our education endeavors are only for these sole palpable purposes and our acquisition of knowledge doesn’t challenge our beliefs and question our realities, then I don’t believe we have received an education; we may have received a degree, but not an education.

  • Education should be an endeavor in which the learner receives knowledge and encounters and experiences a change in how he or she perceives the world.
  • Education should teach us to be more open-minded, in the sense of wanting to understand better those around us who do not share our viewpoints of the world.

Education should teach us to be more conscious of how much good we can do, and to feel a responsibility to leave the world a better place than we found it. Education should lead us to seek more than we find, and to be content even when we do not find at all.
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Does education affect thinking?

How Education Can Impact the Well-Being of a Nation How can impact the well-being of a nation?, professor of educational and developmental psychology at the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, has been building a cumulative body of research precisely on this topic.

  • This has resulted in a new book titled,
  • I had the opportunity to ask Heiner some questions about his new book.
  • What is the role of education and cognitive ability in relation to the development of “human capital”? RINDERMANN: A high-quality education enhances the development of thinking, deepens knowledge, furthers, changes attitudes, and trains special skills, which are all important for success in the world of work.

With a higher quality of education, more complex tasks can be solved, and behavior suffers less from fewer mistakes. The positive side effects spread into everyday life and social relations. Usually, the individuals themselves, near them, and more broadly society as a whole benefit.

Education works through the enhancement of cognitive ability — which is a combination of and knowledge — and also through the mechanisms of changing personality and behavior. In my view, human capital is that aspect of human abilities and attributes that are useful to the economy (see page 40 of for more detail).

Why is human capital important to national well-being? Cognitive human capital has a positive impact on, production, institutional efficiency, and norm-obeying behavior. Therefore, economic growth,, income, wealth, and well-being are increased. Apart from the gains for the economy and for individual and national wealth, freedom, democracy, and the rule of law also benefit.

  1. People live in a safer and more liberal society.
  2. What education policies do you recommend based on your new “theory of cognitive capitalism”? Cognitive capitalism refers to the idea that the cognitive ability of society as a whole, and of its cognitive elite in particular, is the prerequisite for the development of technological progress, for the historic development of modern society with its increasing cognitive demands and complexity, and for the wealth-furthering norms and institutions that form the core of the capitalist system (including economic freedom, free markets, the rule of law, and property rights).

In effect, cognitive ability is crucial in creating and sustaining a high-achievement milieu, leading not only to economic growth and wealth, but also to a, The two most important factors are invested time in learning from early on and an achievement-oriented structure in education — tests, central exams, decisions/promotion based on objectively measured achievement, discipline for improved learning, the aim of school and instruction is learning/achievement, etc.

  • Surrounded by further factors, such as higher teacher quality and more problem-solving in instruction.
  • Discipline increases the time spent on tasks, and relevant content tested in central exams shows positive effects on cognitive achievement.
  • Additionally, cognitive training programs, such as, are short and effective — this is not to be confused with working training, which is too narrow.

Because weaker students usually benefit more, such training programs can help to reduce achievement gaps. They show not only positive and lasting effects on IQ tests and intelligence, but also on school achievement, attentional behavior, and language competences. Education Teaches You How To Think : How Education Can Impact the Well-Being of a Nation
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What is education in your thinking?

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Education is about learning skills and knowledge, It also means helping people to learn how to do things and support them to think about what they learn. It’s also important for educators to teach ways to find and use information. Education may help and guide individuals from one class to other. Educated individuals and groups can do things like, help less educated people and encourage them to get educated. A school class with a sleeping schoolmaster, oil on panel painting by Jan Steen, 1672
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Do universities teach you how do you think?

Kind of. I’ll explain; let’s jump in. We’re going to take an old cliché and make something useful out of it. Here it is: College teaches you how to think, not what to think. The saying sounds nice, but it’s always troubled me. After all, my professors have told me exactly what to think in many classes.

Accounting, communications, psychology, physics, and many others require a pretty extensive level of knowledge to pass tests. My experience in college doesn’t line up with the cliché, so let’s improve it. College should teach you how to think, not what to think. This version of the cliché is better. It talks about what we wish happened in college, instead of saying certain things do happen in college that actually don’t,

This version is still bad though, because it says college shouldn’t teach students what to think. But don’t we want college to teach our accountants, doctors, and engineers what to think about certain topics before they operate on our bodies, bridges, and tax returns ? From personal experience as a finance major, I can guarantee you that an interviewer won’t be satisfied with me saying, “I don’t know that specific financial calculation, but I can think about it really well!” So let’s continue improving the cliché.

  1. College should teach you how to think and what to think.
  2. I think it’ll be easier to split this up into two sentences, while we’re at it.1: College should teach you how to think.2: College should also teach you what to think.
  3. Here we can see a minor linguistic problem – Saying “college teaches us what to think” really means “college teaches us facts.” For example, your psychology professor wouldn’t start off a class by saying, “Good morning students; today I’m going to teach you what to think about the Dunning-Kruger effect,” That’s just a weird phrasing.

Accounting professors don’t teach you “what to think” about accounting, they just teach you how accounting works. Physics professors don’t teach you “what to think” about the velocity equation, they just teach you the equation. Important note: College doesn’t usually teach us random facts,

True, we sometimes learn useless things in classes, but most often we learn material that’s actually relevant to our lives and future careers. So, Revision #3: 1: College should teach you how to think.2: College should also teach you useful facts. We can’t improve the second sentence any further, so let’s focus on the first sentence.

If college is teaching us how to think, and “facts” are what we think about, then by extension, college is teaching us how to think about facts, Easy edit here: 1: College should teach you how to think about facts.2: College should also teach you useful facts.

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Let’s clear up the meaning by flipping the sentence order: 1: College should teach you useful facts.2: College should also teach you how to think about facts. The second sentence is too abstract. What does “thinking about facts” even mean? When you’re “thinking about facts,” you’re trying to understand them.

If you’re stressing over a significant other’s behavior, trying to decipher gibberish on a chemistry exam, or muddling through IRS tax forms, you’re thinking about facts so you can understand them. Simple fix: 1: College should teach you useful facts.2: College should also teach you how to interpret facts.

Next, what does it mean to “interpret facts?” When you’re puzzling through a factual question on your chemistry test, you refer to other facts for the answer – What does the formula sheet say? Didn’t the professor mention this in class? When you try to understand your significant other’s behavior, you relate the questionable behavior to other facts – Has she communicated like this in the past? Is his stress level just really high right now? Same thing with struggling on tax returns – What does the IRS website say about this? Was I able to claim this tax credit last year? We don’t interpret individual facts in a vacuum.

Quite the opposite, we always use facts to interpret facts, in a never-ending cycle of learning new things, incorporating the new facts into an existing body of knowledge, and using that knowledge to interpret new facts. In other words, we think in systems, where facts interact together to create understanding.

Second-to-last edit: 1: College should teach you useful facts.2: College should also teach you how to think systematically. We have one last problem. I suggested above that people always think systematically. If that’s the case, why does college need to teach people how to do something that they already do? The answer is that college doesn’t teach you how to start thinking systematically.

It does two other important things instead. First, college teaches you better systems than the ones you came to college with. You could also think about these “better systems” as new languages, I’ll give you one example: A freshman accounting major enters college believing that the tax code is just a sneaky tool for stealing money out of citizens’ pockets.

Tax accounting classes broaden her understanding of the tax code, teaching her that many arcane-seeming tax policies exist because lawmakers wanted to give rewards to a particular constituent group (like corn farmers) or incentivize a certain activity (like home ownership). She now finds it much easier to understand tax policy.

College taught her a better system, moving her from ignorance to reasoned understanding. Second, college teaches you to want more of the “better systems.” Have you ever experienced a flash of enlightenment, one of those moments where can you feel the lightbulb over your head? Oh my gosh, I never thought about it that way before,

  1. It’s a giddy feeling, isn’t it? To experience that giddiness more often, we have to deliberately seek out better systems.
  2. There’s a key difference between deliberately seeking better systems and unconsciously falling into better systems.
  3. The latter requires nothing of you, while the former demands self-awareness, or conscious knowledge of your irrationalities and watchfulness for opportunities to improve.

In plain English, college should make you hungry for learning. So here’s our final major edit, taking both the first and second points: 1: College should teach you useful facts.2: College should also increase your self-awareness and your fluency in systematic thinking.
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How does education help critical thinking?

Critical thinking can be developed in students by helping them construct their thoughts after analyzing, interpreting, and examining information.
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Why is education good for the brain?

Julian Lagoy, MD – There are plenty of things you can do in your daily life, such as having thought-provoking conversations or watching intelligent, educational TV shows, like documentaries, to keep your brain healthy. — Julian Lagoy, MD Education and lifelong learning help us use our brains to their maximum potential by stirring up our curiosity and intellect, Dr.

Lagoy adds. The more you use your brain, the more oxygen it requires, and your body increases blood flow to it to fulfill the higher demand. This is what keeps it healthy and active and benefits brain health, “It’s similar to how cardio exercise every day helps benefit the health of your heart,” Dr. Lagoy explains.

“It’s just like working out your other muscles, he explains: “The more you keep the mind engaged the healthier you are for it, whereas if you don’t use it regularly, it is more likely to atrophy.” However, you don’t have to work in academia to keep your mind engaged and stimulated.
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How does education change your brain?

Understanding Your Brain to Help You Learn Better The past few years have been marked by a large number of discoveries about the learning brain. Those insights have the potential to support teachers in designing even better classroom environments to help you learn better.

  1. While understanding the brain can be helpful for teachers, this knowledge can also be beneficial for you as a student.
  2. For instance, it can encourage you to believe in your capacity to improve your own skills.
  3. Such beliefs make it more likely for you to make an effort and to make better use of supportive learning strategies,

In this article, we briefly present some core principles of the learning brain and suggest learning strategies inspired by neuroscience for you to try at school or at home. Your brain is primarily composed of about 85 billion neurons, which is more than the number of stars you can see with the naked eye in the night sky.

A neuron is a cell which acts as a messenger, sending information in the form of nerve impulses (like electrical signals) to other neurons (see ). For example, when you are writing, some neurons in your brain send the “move fingers” message to other neurons and this message then travels through the nerves (like cables) all the way to your fingers.

The electrical signals that are communicated from one neuron to another are therefore what allows you to do everything you do: write, think, see, jump, talk, compute, and so on. Each neuron can be connected with up to 10,000 other neurons, leading to a large number of connections in your brain, which looks like a very dense spider web (see ).

Figure 1 – Figure illustrating two neurons that are connected.

Education Teaches You How To Think

Figure 2 – Figure illustrating the very large number of connections between neurons.

When you are learning, important changes take place in your brain, including the creation of new connections between your neurons. This phenomenon is called, The more you practice, the stronger these connections become. As your connections strengthen, the messages (nerve impulses) are transmitted increasingly faster, making them more efficient,

That is how you become better at anything you learn whether it is playing football, reading, drawing, etc. We can compare the connections between your neurons to trails in a forest (see ). Walking through a forest without a trail is difficult, because you have to compact and push the vegetation and branches out of the way to carve your way through.

But the more you use the same trail, the easier and more practicable it becomes. Conversely, when you stop using the trail, the vegetation grows back, and the trail slowly disappears. This is very similar to what happens in your brain—when you stop practicing something, the connections between your neurons weaken and can ultimately be dismantled or pruned. Education Teaches You How To Think

Figure 3 – Figure illustrating the analogy of the trail in the forest.

The fact that learning rewires your neurons shows how dynamic (plastic) your brain is—that the brain changes and does not remain fixed. Practicing or rehearsing repeatedly activates your neurons and makes you learn. These changes happen as early as when a baby is in their mother’s womb and continues throughout a person’s life.
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What is the true purpose of education?

What is the main purpose of education? – The main purpose of education is to provide the opportunity for acquiring knowledge and skills that will enable people to develop their full potential, and become successful members of society. School does not just involve letters and numbers, but also teachers and the entire education system where students are taught critical thinking, honesty, and humanitarianism.
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Is learning a form of thinking?

Broadly speaking, learning is impossible without thinking process. The rote-learning cannot promote thinking since there is no cognitive process in rote- learning. So, learning is inextricably intertwined with thinking.
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Who said education is training the mind to think?

The art of ‘training the mind to think’ Jenny Patrickson, Managing Director, Active IQ “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think,” Albert Einstein famously said. A good education provider will know this of course and understand their role is to encourage learners to think for themselves, seek out further knowledge, expand their horizons and be curious to find out more.

  • Einstein gave us a number of pithy and profound quotes around education.
  • Another of his I like is, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” This reminds us that ‘education’ is not limited to our school-age years.
  • Furthermore, vocational learning and professional education can – and should – be a far different experience from learning by rote in the classroom.

Before I joined Active IQ, I worked within education provider and operator environments and learned a great deal from this experience. Prior to that I was a professional dancer and trusted the education process to enable me to move from this career into the world of fitness education where I worked as a lecturer and trainer for fitness and group exercise instructors.

My role is somewhat different today, but the principles of education and the true value of inspirational teaching remain with me, forming the firm foundations on which I built my career. A good start My experience of coming into this industry as a practitioner and then fitness instructor is not unusual.

Many managers, managing directors, CEOs and business owners will have started in a similar role. And therein lies their strength – understanding how it feels for new recruits and colleagues who are starting out, learning and progressing their careers.

  • Fundamental to all this is the education provider whose support and guidance help shape and steer us as professionals.
  • The role of an education provider – especially those offering vocational and adult training – is not simply to impart information and help students pass exams.
  • We should have left this formulaic approach when we left school.
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A good education provider will instil confidence and pride in a student’s work, not just knowledge. They will develop in their students a sense of curiosity and a desire to keep questioning as much as learning. In a nutshell, a training provider worth his or her salt will bring a little extra something into the learning process – something that books and websites alone can’t teach.

Never stop learning Einstein believed that, “Once you stop learning, you start dying.” We must feed our curious and inquisitive minds and follow our desire to learn more each day. This process will not require education providers to email or WhatsApp us regularly to prod us into action: if they’ve done their job well, such a desire will be instilled in us forever.

Speaking of doing their job well, education providers are perhaps the unsung heroes of our dynamic and diverse sector. Whether working as third-party training providers or in-house alongside operator employers, good education providers have the potential to create and retain our industry’s best talent.

Time to celebrate Historically, we have been very good as a sector at celebrating the achievements of individuals, teams and organisations who have excelled in their work with industry awards events chock full of outstanding entries and deserving winners.Until now, there has been little in the way of recognising the talents of the education providers who have helped to shape these award-winning people and businesses

All that is set to change this year with the new ukactive Awards Education Provider of the Year Award which will showcase the very best training provision in the sector. Seeking to shine a light on organisations and programmes that provide excellent delivery, demonstrate innovative resources and assessments and enable learners or employees to show high-quality skills, this is a great opportunity for us to recognise and thank those who provide the foundations for our sector.

Here at Active IQ we’re very pleased to put our name to this new Award while also continuing our commitment as headline sponsor for the ukactive Awards. Setting the best example Good education providers have the opportunity – and responsibility – to set high standards while ensuring a broad learning, full understanding and deep appreciation for our sector.

Their job is not simply to ‘get students through’. Instead, we look to them to deliver a rich educational experience that is assimilated over time, absorbed fully and executed by students with both commitment and belief. They are likely to deliver their training in a range of ways, from classic classroom settings and online learning to blended models and even gamification.

  • Their role is not to let learners believe their qualification is the ‘end point’ of their studies but, rather, the start of their career and springboard to their next learning experience.
  • We know CPD is the cornerstone of evolving skillsets, but without the desire to keep learning, fitness professionals will fall short, and eventually fall out of the industry.

Seeing the best in class If the education provider does their job well, they will instil a desire to learn more and continue with education, thus setting people up nicely for a rewarding and satisfying career. With so much at stake from the very start of a learner’s journey, it’s absolutely right that our industry recognises and celebrates the best training and education providers.

  • I, for one, am looking forward to this year’s ukactive Awards entries and have no doubt that even the most experienced among us will learn from seeing how they have excelled in education provision.
  • The ukactive Awards will take place in Birmingham on Thursday 30 June.
  • Please visit the ukactive Awards page for,

Active IQ is a member of the ukactive Strategic Partner Group – find out more, Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of ukactive. More People More Active More Often : The art of ‘training the mind to think’
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Should students be taught how do you think?

Teaching Children ‘How’ To Think And Not ‘What’ To Think | by Rancho Labs | Medium We do not wish to have an army of like-minded people with a robotic sense of learning in the future. If we’re to develop and discover new wonderful answers to the many problems we are facing, we must encourage children to think critically,outside the box.

  • They should feel free to have their own thoughts and thinking process.
  • Hence, it is essential that,
  • They should be conditioned to think critically, to ask questions, and to be imaginative with their ideas.
  • Learning to think is similar to learning any other habit as it must be learnt and then practiced.

Because changing habits and routines is one of the most difficult things a person can do, it’s essential to teach children how to think from the very beginning, while their personalities and brain is still developing. ‘s famous quote ” Children must be taught how to think, not what to think ” should be put into reality in order to raise innovative-minded children.
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Does education make you intelligent?

The relationship between intelligence and education is one that scientists have been studying for years. It is correct to say that higher level of education leads to greater level of intelligence and also true the other way around, however, it does not apply for every situation.

A study done in Germany proved how education did affect the intelligence of students and proof of intelligence affecting education was seen in the military, where people with lesser intelligence were observed to have a slower learning speed and benefited less from education. Typically if maternal and paternal IQ is high, it is very likely for the child to have a high IQ as well.

A study conducted by Plug and Vijverberg showed that the environment that a child grows up in also affects his or her future academic performance. The children that were raised by their biological parents had a greater similarity in terms of intelligence and academic performance to their families than those raised by foster parents.
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Does education change your personality?

“A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.” -Nelson Mandela – Education plays a very important role in every aspect of our life. A person who understands the practical applicability of education is successful in his life.Being a student, merely rending the textual things and scoring good marks is not important. Education is about learning skills and knowledge. It helps us to build opinions and have our own point of view on different things in life. The process by which an individual acquires new skills, behaviors or understanding, often in a formal or informal setting is called education. Education Teaches You How To Think An individual’s personality is the sum total of person’s quality, characteristics,attitudes,quirks, psychological traits, beliefs and motives which make up his identity. Personality doesn’t mean only your outlook. Personality development means improvement in all spheres of an individual’s life.

“Personality is the sum and organization of those traits which determine the role of the individual in the group.” – By Robert Park and Earnest Bugess The role that education plays in shaping our personality is matchless. Being educated means to elevate our personalities. One’s personality development is as important as being educated.

Elevated personality pushes us to move forward and outshine in the crowd. But for having a good personality education is very important. There are many such personalities who have set forth their lives as an example for the society like Bill Gates, Stephen Hawkins etc. Education Teaches You How To Think Through the education, an individual learns that how should we behave with others. People’s behaviour get them respect in the society. A wrong behavior can spoil the personality of any individual. In educational system, people learn the code of conduct that how to behave with others.

An educated person knows that how to act at different places. Education teaches us that what kind of words we should use when we talk to others. An educated individual know that that we should never use any kind of abusive language with others. Education teaches us that how can we control our emotions.

In our society, we have to communicate rightly and behave properly. The time when you are walking along with the society, is a real practical of your code of conduct. Education Teaches You How To Think Positivity allows a person to deal with difficulties successfully. Education teaches us to be positive. Those people have positive attitude can easily remove hurdles of their ways. Through the education, an individual can develop a positive attitude towards things and people.

Education teaches us that everything which exists in this world have some negative aspects as well as some positive aspects. So, we shouldn’t ponder over only the negativity in someone, we should also watch and think upon the positive aspects of the things, people or situations. Then we could be able to understand things properly.

The person who is able to correct other’s mistakes as well is considered as a good personality. With the help of education an individual can be aware of his personal and political rights. It tells us how to get our rights and also how to respect other people’s rights. Education Teaches You How To Think Education enhances our knowledge by providing us useful information; “Old information” and “new information”. It gives us general information in various subjects like History, Geography, Civics, Science etc and we come to know about the things clearly. It gets us updated about new information in various fields like technology and new inventions etc. Education also helps us in increasing confidence in various ways like communication, decision making, meeting challenges, receiving feedback and improving self confidence.

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Decision Making– The best decisions are backed by knowledge and When we have deeper understanding of anything then we are in the position of making confident decisions. Meeting Challenges – Education teach us that how to manage activities and if any problem arises at the same time-how to solve it confidently. Receiving Feedback – Teachers feedback always boosts the confidence in the students. Negative feedback forces student to do better next time and by getting positive feedback students do something new in that area.

Education provide us many opportunities and many experiences. When we get different opportunities, we show off our personality and make it even better. Opportunities and experiences both words are interrelated. Opportunity brings to us many new things with new experiences.We take those experiences only when we take up the opportunities rightly as provided by education.

Along with all kind of real knowledge and bookish knowledge, teachers also impart moral values in students and from these moral values they learn the healthy habits and try to inculcate to them. Healthy habits like how timely we can done our work, keep the surroundings neat and clean and to do a work in disciplined manner, etc.

So, through these healthy habits education helps us in development of personality. Education teach us ethics which helps us to go to a right path and adopt the right things.Then we do all the things in a fair manner only to become successful.So, Ethics always improves our personality in a positive way.
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Does education have an effect on IQ?

The relationship between intelligence and education is one that scientists have been studying for years. It is correct to say that higher level of education leads to greater level of intelligence and also true the other way around, however, it does not apply for every situation.

A study done in Germany proved how education did affect the intelligence of students and proof of intelligence affecting education was seen in the military, where people with lesser intelligence were observed to have a slower learning speed and benefited less from education. Typically if maternal and paternal IQ is high, it is very likely for the child to have a high IQ as well.

A study conducted by Plug and Vijverberg showed that the environment that a child grows up in also affects his or her future academic performance. The children that were raised by their biological parents had a greater similarity in terms of intelligence and academic performance to their families than those raised by foster parents.
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How does education affect a person?

Health Behaviors – Knowledge and skills: In addition to being prepared for better jobs, people with more education are more likely to learn about healthy behaviors. Educated patients may be more able to understand their health needs, follow instructions, advocate for themselves and their families, and communicate effectively with health providers.21 People with more education are more likely to learn about health and health risks, improving their literacy and comprehension of what can be complex issues critical to their wellbeing.

People who are more educated are more receptive to health education campaigns. Education can also lead to more accurate health beliefs and knowledge, and thus to better lifestyle choices, but also to better skills and greater self-advocacy. Education improves skills such as literacy, develops effective habits, and may improve cognitive ability.

The skills acquired through education can affect health indirectly (through better jobs and earnings) or directly (through ability to follow health care regimens and manage diseases), and they can affect the ability of patients to navigate the health system, such as knowing how to get reimbursed by a health plan.

  1. Thus, more highly educated individuals may be more able to understand health care issues and follow treatment guidelines.21–23 The quality of doctor-patient communication is also poorer for patients of low socioeconomic status.
  2. A review of the effects of health literacy on health found that people with lower health literacy are more likely to use emergency services and be hospitalized and are less likely to use preventive services such as mammography or take medications and interpret labels correctly.

Among the elderly, poor health literacy has been linked to poorer health status and higher death rates.24
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Does education affect cognitive development?

DISCUSSION – In the present study, we aimed to explore the effects of education on cognitive aging and brain aging in cognitively normal elderly. The main findings include: (1) cognitively normal elderly with high educational attainment have a high level of wide cognitive functioning and a significantly decreased age-related reduction in executive function; (2) the intellectual and social types of leisure activities mediate the association between education and multiple cognitive domains, including memory, language, attention and executive function; (3) there are differences in age-related GM atrophy between the high and the low education groups in the anterior regions (ORBsupmed.L and ACG.L) and age-related WM damage in the forceps major and SLF.temporal regions; and (4) the regional WM integrity mediates the interaction effects of education and age on cognition. The concept of CR suggests that more education may help delay cognitive declines in the healthy elderly, and may also enable individuals with AD to be more resilient to brain damage by allowing them to use cognitive processing or compensatory approaches, In the current study, individuals with higher educational attainment performed better in almost all of the cognitive domains including visuo-spatial ability, executive function, and language. Our findings confirmed those obtained in other studies exploring the role of education in healthy participants. In a community-based study conducted by Brickman, Siedlecki et al. (2011), the researchers found that higher reserves are connected with better cognitive function performance such as memory, visual spatial ability and executive ability. Meanwhile, the same study suggested that people with higher reserves are better able to cope with cognitive diseases than those with lower reserves. Moreover, we identified interaction effects of education and age on executive function. A study based on 51 community-dwelling older adults found that education had a moderating effect on the influence of age on cognitive abilities including digital ability, reasoning ability, spatial orientation ability, verbal fluency and semantic comprehension, suggesting that higher educated participants have slower cognitive aging declines, Our findings suggest that individuals with higher educational attainment have better cognition function in the cognitively normal stage. Additionally, the process of cognitive aging may be slower relative to their lower educated peers. The results of the current study indicate that the highly educated elderly prefer to participate in knowledge-dependent activities such as reading, studying in a senior university, using the computer, and performing Chinese traditional martial arts, which were associated with lower risks of MCI, Previous research demonstrated that reduced participation in leisure activities is an early marker of dementia that precedes declines on cognitive tests, Verghese et al. reported that reading, playing board games, playing musical instruments, and dancing were associated with a reduced risk of dementia, The lack of significant effects of playing musical instruments and dancing observed in our study is likely due to cultural differences. Cultural differences may influence this point because instrument playing and dancing is not popular among Chinese elders, whereas Chinese traditional martial arts, which serves as a type of conventional exercise in China, produces both physical and spiritual benefits. Educational experiences provide the foundation for continued intellectual stimulation across the life course, such as greater participation in various lifestyle activities. Further, participating in these knowledge-dependent activities provides a great opportunity for increasing cognitive ability. The education-cognition relations can be at least explained by participation in activities in later life. With regard to the cognitive impairment stage, our post-hoc analysis showed that no cognitive tests exhibited a significant age×education interaction in MCI patients ( Supplementary Table 3 ). Higher education levels may decrease the risk of MCI, and seem to confer protection leading to later cognitive impairment onset (p<0.001 for the mean age). MCI patients with higher education levels appeared to have poorer performance on the AVLT, BNT and TMT-B tests, although they did not have a significant age-related variance for any cognitive function. This finding strongly supports the viewpoint that education appears to have different impacts on CR in different cognitive stages, Thus, in future studies, it will be necessary to consider the cognitive stage when exploring the protective effect of education. The GM results indicate that cognitively normal elders with low education suffer from more severe atrophy in the anterior brain regions (ORBsupmed.L and ACG.L) as age increases. Previous studies confirmed that the cognitively normal elderly with low levels of education suffer from more severe temporal and anterior region atrophy. For instance, Liu et al. found significantly greater thickness in the temporal pole, the transverse temporal gyrus, and the isthmus of the cingulate cortex among the elderly with higher levels of education, Additionally, the anterior regions are considered to develop later and age earlier, These regions are more significantly affected by normal aging rather than AD, and the difference is significantly correlated with years of education, Thus, obtaining more education experience could slow down the aging process in these regions. The current study demonstrates that as the years of education increase, the WM integrity of the forceps major was reserved more and of the SLF.temporal part remained intact. The occipital lobe is vulnerable in the aging process similar to the prefrontal lobe, Furthermore, a case study indicates that the forceps major may be related to the orientation ability, Additionally, the results from structural equation modeling revealed interaction between age and education could affect cognition indirectly through SLF.temporal part integrity integrity. The SLF is a large bundle of association fibers in the WM of the cerebral hemispheres connecting the parietal, occipital and temporal lobes with the ipsilateral frontal cortices, There is accumulating evidence that the SLF is correlated with core cognitive processes in the brain such as attention, language, emotions and memory. The SLF have extensive connections with cortical regions involved in language comprehension (Wernicke's area) and language production (Broca's area), Furthermore, patients with an SLF lesion or degeneration often show impairments in sentence processing and verbal working memory, To summarize, education may increase WM integrity among the healthy elderly, leading to increased brain reserves. View complete answer