megan@elon (Megan Squire)

Dr. Megan Squire's blog -- Elon University, Department of Computing Sciences

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Difference between education and training

Are you being trained or educated? From a very controversial writer and educator, David Noble, in an older issue of Monthly Review:
[E]ducation must be distinguished from training ... because the two are so often conflated. In essence, training involves the honing of a person’s mind so that it can be used for the purposes of someone other than that person. Training thus typically entails a radical divorce between knowledge and the self. Here knowledge is usually defined as a set of skills or a body of information designed to be put to use, to become operational, only in a context determined by someone other than the trained person; in this context the assertion of self is not only counterproductive, it is subversive to the enterprise.

"Education is the exact opposite of training in that it entails not the disassociation but the utter integration of knowledge and the self, in a word, self-knowledge. Here knowledge is defined by and, in turn, helps to define, the self. Knowledge and the knowledgeable person are basically inseparable."


So education is about learning for oneself, and training is about learning for the sake of someone else.