Dennis Hayes recently wrote a piece for Spiked which discusses the construct at the heart of this contrast:
- ...the idea we have of the university, and one seldom commented on, is the shift from education to training. In short, HE has been transformed into a huge training scheme. Whereas education is an open-ended, creative endeavour, training is designed to prepare people for specific roles and is structured around meeting fixed objectives.
- What has been entirely forgotten in current discussions about ‘What is university for?’ is this important distinction between training and education. Policymakers, political commentators, university managers, lecturers and students now see no difference between the two.
Training is fatally flawed within the education system, especially at university. Change is both ongoing and accelerating. By definition, any training provided at a university level is already dated, behind the times and irrelevant to the very market requirements it claims to be serving. Training is frozen in the constructs and concepts of those professors doing the training: it is a map of how the world was, not how it is or how it is becoming.
In contrast, education is the basis of lifelong learning. It is a compass to empower and guide an individual through their life journey, a set of principles and constructs that are both timeless and progressively honed through practice and application as an individual's life develops and unfolds.
Training has an inherently self-justifying quality: the student must keep repeating and recycling their training to "remain current" -- a recurrent , reregistration function not lost on institutions that profit from that training activity.
Conversely, education should be one and done. Get a handle on the whole learning thing once, and then be equipped to use that higher education to continuously adapt to and innovate the change you wish to see in the world.
If you are a student in one of my courses, and you desire to learn, you do. The motivation to learn, to extend the mind and to push the envelop of understanding, is an internally derived enthusiasm. We learn because we are engaged, we are enjoying the experience and we see the relevance of the learning to our own lives. Simple really.
Many students come into my courses not knowing or accepting this reality. They have been conditioned to associate grade attainment with education. They fail to realize that a high mark does not mean understanding or comprehension, merely the successful completion of an assessment activity. In my courses assessment is learning, of learning and for learning.
The high entitlement snowflakes in the class bitch and complain, some repent and prosper, others not. Some even boast of their lack of engagement on the rate my professor websites, not even aware of the irony that they are posting their own disrespect for their own learning.
I do not "learn" students. I do not "train" them and then in an exam ask them to jump and assess the height and form of their ability to respond in some Pavlovian multiple-choice stimulus.
Rather, I engage the students in an exploration of their own comprehension and understanding of the subject, its relevancy to them, and them as individuals as a consequence of the learning that has now changed who they are and who they going to be in life.
You can Google anything. The point is not trained memorization. Or the ability to puke the "correct" ideas as stipulated by a professor's lectures in the approved style for a journal no one will ever read.
No, the point to higher education should be the progressive realization of a higher functioning human being, one who can take responsibility for themselves and their actions, can lead, can inspire, can innovate change to improve the world wherever they find it and is enthused to act sustainably i.e. to actively engage in the complexities of continuous improvement consistent with deep values of human purpose.
Education, not training.
