What is Education?- A thread on learning and teaching, the creative process, practice

[BayonetBrant]

"Intellectual" improvement? Hmm, personally, I wouldn't limit it to to intellectual.

That's why I wasn't trying to define "education"

Hmm, much as I appreciate the way you've laid it out, I still would have to disagree with you.

That's what discussions are for!

First off, "training" and "learning" (despite PPT influence neologisms) are actually from different stances. "Learning" if from the stance of the receiver / interpreter, while "training" is from the "instructor's" stance. Having tried to learn how to knit, I know that what I need to do is rehearse; I just put knitting pretty far down the line of what I "need" to know.

Basically, what I'm saying is that "training" and "education" are both from the instructor stance, while "learning" is from the receiver stance. I can "learn" from either type of situation but, just because I am learning, doesn't mean that I am being either "educated" or "trained".

I'm going to re-iterate my stance with some different wording then, because I don't think training/learning has anything to do with which direction you are in the teacher-student relationship.
I am still standing by "learning" being "new skill acquisition" but will adjust training to being "skill rehearsal and refinement".
Hard lesson learned at NTC: don't put all the tank ammo on the same HEMMT in the emergency resupply at the CTCP. I know how to plan for tactical resupply and I know how to pre-plan ammo packages that meet weight/cube standards for trucks - I wasn't "learning" how to plan tactical resupply; I was training it. Part of that training was refining the skill to the point that you don't put all the tank ammo on one HEMMT, even if it fits.
Now, colloquially, in the field, we call this a "lesson learned" and that's fine for a discussion point out there. But if you want to finely slice the differences in how education works, you have to distinguish them somehow, just as Operation Terms and Graphics distinguishes "seize" and "secure".

Dropping the sillyness (yes, Wilf, it's one of THOSE days for me), we, as in any group of people, can decide what someone should be trained in. These are often called "learning objectives", which is all fine and dandy. However, baring certain fairly specific types of skills (e.g. repetitive tasks operating in a high predictive validity area of knowledge), we really can't exercise that much control over what our students actually learn.

We can, once you change the colloquial definition of "learn" to something more exact. Might we need to put a term in play to cover secondary/unintentional wisdom gained through the learning/training process? Probably. But over-expanding the definitions of existing terms will inevitably lead repetitive caveats of "and by x-term I mean as used in this fashion.

For example, I have taught (another word we might want to add into the mix), students to perform mechanical analytic sequences which they have been able to do perfectly in a variety of settings without being able to interpret what the implications of their results are. Now, I would call what they received (learned if you will) "training" even though my intention was "education" (in this instance, being able to extrapolate from the mechanical manipulations performed).

I think we could characterize that as a case of "learning" (how to extrapolate) while "training" (the rote manipulations). No?