I can speak from personal experience. I was considered a very intelligent kid in my tiny rural town ever since I was young. I took AP classes and spent hours every day devouring books. The librarian knew me like one of her own kids. It was just something that came naturally to me.
However, I was also so insulated in my all-white, all-conservative, sometimes openly racist community that I would not call myself educated in anything but a technical manner at that time. Sure, I could break down a complex calculus equation or tell you the history of Prussia, but I had no idea what it was like to have non-white friends or how their lives compared to mine. I got to grow up listening to my family bitch around the table at Christmas about "welfare queens driving Cadillacs and n****rs waiting to kill all the white people". I watched my uncle have a local artist paint an 8-FOOT TALL image of a fetus on his barn facing the main highway to show how pro-life he was. This same uncle slept with a loaded .44 mag under his bed because he was convinced a race war was imminent. I saw our town of 400 people boycott the local diner when a Mexican family bought it, until the family left town. I got to hear people in town openly bitch about how our community was going to hell because a family had the audacity to adopt a 5 yr old African American boy and enroll him in our all-white school. And bear in mind, this was all in the 1980's and 1990's! This wasn't 50 years ago. It was also Michelle Bachman territory, if that tells you anything.
Only by leaving that insular world and going to college was I able to truly become educated, not just in the classroom but also outside of it. My freshman year roommate was Chinese-American. He introduced me to real Chinese food, not chow mein from a can, and we're still close friends to this day. I got to meet black people who weren't all gang members like my family thought they'd be. I got to meet gay people, and they didn't turn me gay like my family said they would! I got to know a woman who needed an abortion to save her life from an ectopic pregnancy.
If I'd have never gone to college, I'm certain I'd still be working the family farm today, likely just as conservative as the rest of my family, with a great big Trump sign at the end of the driveway and a Trump bumper sticker on my truck. I'd still be as intelligent today as I was 20 years ago, but would I be considered educated if I still believed all the shit my family told me?
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