What is Education?- A thread on learning and teaching, the creative process, practice
As we continue to rediscover small wars, as we peel apart the lessons learned from the past history of warfare, as we are nine years removed from 9/11 and still engaged in two protracted insurgencies with many smaller proxy wars below the surface, we are forced to confront gaps in our educational and training institutions. What should be taught? When should it be taught? To whom should we teach? How do we learn? How do we capture lessons learned and compare and contrast them with past experiences? How do we overcome our own conceptual blocks to find better, creative solutions to intractable problems? These questions are mere secondary questions to the larger question,
What is Education?
General Martin Dempsey is working through this problem at the TRADOC level attempting to transform the Army's learning environment. Before him, General David Patraeus provided us with a temporary solution- FM 3-24. Adam Elkus and Captain Crispen Burke wrestle with problem definition as they work to frame and define the scope of Wicked Problems. Major Rob Thorton sorts through these issues.as he attempts to write the doctrine for Security Force Assistance. The boys at CNAS are striving to adjust our Intelligence apparatus. Schmedlap is on a one man crusade to abolish the archaic "task, conditions, and standards," and countless others on this board work to affect change on the tactical level.
Most of us are products of an educational system developed in the early 1900's as a National Security concern to prepare young men for the Industrial Age and military service in a large, conscripted army. This process and structure is severely out of date and needs serious reform. Some politicians have recogonized this need, and we've had some failed measures of reform to include "No child left behind."
So, this thread is dedicated to discussing how we learn. What are the benefits of our current means and ways, and where should we go? What has worked best for you? Who is on the cutting edge of this process, and how can we learn from them? In some ways, this issue is one of National Security.
Looking forward to the discussion.
v/r
Mike
I like Marc's approach to addressing terms:
Learning is from the student's/receiver's perspective while training and education are from the instructor's perspective - agree. However, in my mind, training addresses skills while education addresses concepts. I can train a student to speak Spanish, English, or statistics. But I cannot train a student to comprehend a foreign culture - I can only educate him about that culture. By now, however, you are probably saying B___ S___! Higher level Spanish involves reading Quixote; English, Shakespeare, and stats analyzing multple regressions of political attitudes or something. So, of course, all education includes training components but it jumps to higher levels. An absolutely rotten tool (that nevertheless has its uses:eek:) is Blooms Taxonomy where the lower levels tend to refer to training while the higher orders tend to refer to education.
Cheers
JohnT
There are two kinds of people:
those who divide things into two categories and those who lie about it.
Consider a couple of things from the ancient Greeks;
techne (art/craft) is contrasted with episteme (knowledge/science) by Plato
sophia (wisdom) is contrasted with phronesis (practical wisdom/prudence) by Aristotle
Each of these early heavy hitters suggests that the path to the collections that fall under each term is not the same.
We could also compare/contrast theoria with praxis as ways of “knowing” God or sitting zazen with solving koans as ways of achieving enlightenment.
In English, I think it is worth noting that one learns “about” something but one trains “on” something. We also can note that English grammar and diction tell us that learning involves a relationship between a person and an object—“Larry learns logic.” while training involves a relationship between two persons—“Tom trains Toby.”
We may, with Rene Descartes among others, happen to accept the idea that we are born with innate ideas. We may, instead, agree with John Locke’s refutation of that position and believe our minds are blank slates. We can even take the Kantian line that our "understandings"are “hard-wired” in certain ways that allow (or force) us to make sense of the data presented to us. The beauty of this last position is that it is something of a synthesis: we are still blank slates in terms of content but have something like a syntax ( perhaps a Chomsky “deep structure”) or a file format (FAT32 or NTFS e.g.) to organize the content/lexicon/vocabulary that we acquire along the way.
BLAB (Bottom line at bottom)
Each of these metaphysical positions or presuppositions predisposes one to a certain solution set for the problem of how one figures out how to get along in the world. But, whatever way one comes down on the question of primacy of place, I trust we can all recognize that at least two different activities are involved and a complete solution requires the successful application of both.