A short tantrum inspired by Deb Owen’s blog article “are we waiting for an ‘education crisis’?”:
Training is a matter of preparing a student for specific kinds of situations by equipping them with necessary facts, theories and skills. Training is instrumental and it begins with a need, expressed as a role — a profession — and works backwards to the student.
Education works from the other direction. It begins with the particular student and that student’s virtues, and develops the student as an individual and citizen toward self-fulfillment through service to the community.
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The question of Why is not addressed in training. Training is focuses on What and How.
In education Why is foundational. Knowing how to ask Why — for oneself and with others — is the root from which What and How grow and give Why visible, concrete form. They substantiate and sustain it. But in education What and How are not permitted to crank away without the guidance of Why, as they are in training.
Education is both moral and practical. Training is only practical.
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Training and education are not exclusive categories. There is a degree of training in education and a degree of education in training, especially in a republic like ours. There’s not a bad or good. Neither can be dispensed with. The workforce undeniably needs efficient, effective workers who know how to perform specific kinds of useful tasks. However, it is just as true, but harder to see, that our culture also needs souls who have been cultivated to think beyond means, and to weigh and deliberate and synthesize and communicate the relative value of various ends to various perspectives.
This is the kind of person who ought to be educators.
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My concern is that the education most of our educators have received is training in pedagogical technique and classroom management. Their entire outlook on education is limited to the domain of techne: skills and knowledge. The teacher has the skills and the knowledge to impart skills and knowledge, and to them, that is education. It is not enough for an educator to love teaching. An educator must also love education.