Education vs. Training
I've been involved, engaged, or caught up in education at least since I was six years old. Let's just say it's been a long time. Under the circumstances I might appear to have a vested interest in education, whatever we mean by that. For a brief time when I was an undergraduate I took a few courses in the history of education and educational psychology, courses which I enjoyed, but which hardly prepared me or fitted me for my later career as a teacher. By some lights education is a science, by others an art, and we have institutions labeling it as one or the other. And yet despite all the noise I've heard over the years, I've rarely encountered much serious consideration of what exactly we mean by education.
At some point, probably around the time I was first encountering Latin, I realized that the root meaning of education was "a drawing out (or leading out)," from the Latin verb ducere (to draw, shape, construct) and the prefix ex (out, away from). I've always liked that definition, suggesting the role of the teacher is to lead but also to draw something forth from students. Education is essential for human beings, since our instincts are so stunted, and our lives are so complicated, and have been from our earliest existence. I don't know whether we as a species deserve the generic qualifier homo sapiens, but we certainly depend on knowledge and learning to survive and to thrive as a species.
What then are we to say about this distinction between education and training, a distinction that goes back at least to the Greeks. Some kinds of knowledge are instrumental, the tools we need to get things done. If you want to build a table, you need to learn some skills. On the other hand, if you want to define a table, classify it, place it within a context of other similar objects, derive a category of such things as furniture, if you want to think about tables in some more or less abstract way, you require a different set of tools or intellectual equipment. An excellent maker of tables may never give any thought to such matters. No reason why he or she should. The table maker needs only to know how to construct a table. Labels for things used in the process of making a table, even the name of the finished object itself, if necessary at all, are still only instrumental.
So who needs to think about tables? That's a good question. In fact, that's the essential question lying behind all education. Who needs to think about courage? Who needs to think about war? Who needs to think about farming? Who needs to think about government? Who needs to think about love? Who needs to think about anything? Here's my answer. The first human who made a table did not do it by means of training. That person had to conceive of the idea of a table before making one. Education should enable us to think about things, often in an abstract way, sometimes even before we know how to put those thoughts into action or to make some use of them. That first table was very likely made to serve a purpose, to solve a particular problem or at least answer to a perceived need. That's something human beings are pretty good at. Solving perceived problems, thinking abstractly, coming up with novel solutions and new ideas, sometimes coming up with stuff just for the fun of it.
How do we train someone to think? Ah, there's the rub. That's what education is for. Kenneth Burke, a philosopher and literary theorist, once suggested that "literature is equipment for living." That's true of education as well. Education, even education in literature, can be instrumental. You can learn how to do useful things from reading literature. But it's also good for exercising the mind and opening it to new possibilities. That's why literature has always been a part of education. Storytelling is a means to an end, a way of passing on knowledge. It's certainly entertaining, but it's also foundational. Education is training the mind to think about things.
When education becomes focused only on training us how to do things or make things (and other manifestations of purely instrumental knowledge), we are in danger of losing sight of the fundamental purpose of education, which is to make us human -- wise enough to know how to respond to novel problems, to think abstractly about all those things we encounter in our lives. Educational psychologists have discovered that the capacity for abstract thought seems to appear naturally at a very early age in humans. Education draws that capacity out of us and helps us learn how to use it. You never know when you may need to solve a problem you haven't been trained to solve or to understand something you've never before encountered.


