Is You Educated Or is You Trained?
Recently got the following private message from a person I’ll identify as M. Huffy in order to protect their identity:
Amazing terrible take there Buzz. The [redacted] class was a waste of my time and money because I’ve been [redacted] since I was a child. Both of my parents are [were successful in redacted area]. I would say that makes me educated. Please don’t contact me again.
Now, since they were polite and said “please” I am not responding directly to them, but if they think that’s gonna keep me from responding at large, they are Sadly Mistaken.
The trigger point was this:
They posted they did not understand why, if they wanted to be a [redacted], they needed four years of college with general educational classes in addition to training to be a [redacted]; why not just two years of [redacted] classes? (The post appears to have been since deleted, so I’m reconstructing from memory.)
My response?
I said they were looking for training, not an education. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, there’s a lot of interests and professions where training is more important than education…
…but education and training are not the same thing.
Look, they train football players. They train monkeys. They train white mice.
They even train chickens.
Training hones skills sets and prepares one for specific tasks and circumstances.
It doesn’t prepare one for life at large.
There absolutely are specialized careers that require very specific focused instruction: Medicine, law, engineering, etc.
But usually by the time you start specializing in those fields, you’ve either already had classes outside your specialty or possess a basic liberal arts education degree.
And no, “liberal arts” doesn’t refer to politics; it refers to having a wide sampling of human history, mathematics, science, philosophy, art, etc. to make you a well rounded person.
Training -- which is absolutely a 100% valid approach to a wide variety of challenges -- teaches you how to respond specifically to a set of given circumstances.
Education, conversely, teaches you how to approach a challenge, to figure out a solution on your own, not rely on one provided by somebody else.
Elsewhere I’ve said it’s impossible to teach anybody anything, that the best one can do is facilitate learning. To keep this post from becoming too pedantic, I’m going to confine learning and education to the two admittedly oversimplified definitions above; the reality is that both require a receptive pupil.
“When the student is ready,
the master will appear.”
While there are certainly formal educational programs with standards and degrees, the truth is we should all be autodidacts.*
The sadder truth, of course, is that multitudes actively seek to avoid learning anything.
The reasons may vary, but a common linking factor is a reluctance to move out of one’s comfort zone.**
Education can be both a joyous and a painful experience, but when it’s painful it’s like a crustacean molting off its old shell, growing into a new one better suited for its life.
It may hurt to learn something, but it leaves one bigger and better as a result.
Training is just rote.
It can be vital and important and certainly well trained firemen and medical personnel use their training to save lives and help others, but it’s not really about thinking.
Much of training resides in body memory, getting four limbs and digits to perform without thinking in a manner that’s been drilled into you.
I’ll never knock training; it most certainly has its place, and M. Huffy is not wrong to want to skip all that boring educational stuff to focus just on the predetermined skill set they’d like to master.
But an education will serve one better.
© Buzz Dixon
* Look it up. That’s why they invented Google.
** Paradoxically, these same people are often quick to parrot “do your own research” when what they really mean is “find things that reinforce your prejudices” not “seek things that challenge your basic assumptions.” Let the record show that this is not the area where M. Huffy and I disagree, but does illustrated the importance of genuine education.
