I'm with Rex on here - but I think 'educated' is the wrong word and you're falling down a linguistic cavern. Reading books does not make you 'educated' - it means you've read a lot of books. Whether you can apply what you've read or heard in practice is a better view of education. There are plenty of people who've done many years at a University but who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag - likewise there are plenty of people who left school at 14 whose insight, opinion and understanding is far better. A country needs to work out how to keep a population engaged with the mechanism of democracy and find ways of ensuring that educated people (who can't think properly) don't get put into undeserving positions of power - but also that the education system adapts in a way that understands 'being qualified' is not the same thing as learning. By the same token, it also has to teach people that 'having an opinion' is not the same thing as having a well constructed argument. Opinions are always valid (at least in the mind of the people saying them) but arguments are empirically valid or not - the difference is important.