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

[marct]

Hi pup,

Very interesting discussion and one that I have spent some time dealing with for the last few years. I come from a different perspective then most of the posts on this page; in that I am an internet educated holder of an associate’s degree in general education; however I am also a CSM and responsible for training, educating and developing junior leaders for our army.

Excellent! We need someone who will go "Uh, guys, do you realize you are about to walk over a cliff?"

Since the discussion started with TRADOC I went back to the latest DRAFT of FM 7.0 Training for Full Spectrum Operations and looked at their definitions of training and education.

Paragraph 3-5 states;

"The Army Training System comprises training and education. Training is not solely the domain of the generating force; similarly, education continues in the operational Army. Training and education occur in all three training domains. Training prepares individuals for certainty. Education prepares individuals for uncertainty. Education enables agility, judgment, and creativity. Training enables action."

I don’t particularly disagree with the statement. Training prepares one to act, and education prepares one to adapt those actions to meet success. That makes sense to me. What does not make sense to me is the ways in which the army has separated the two. As an enlisted soldier and later as an NCO, I have been “Educated” in only 4 schools in the Army; PLDC, BNCOC, ANCOC and the USASMA. Every other TRADOC experience I have had has been focused on “training”. Likewise I was never “educated” in unit training. The Army accounts for this by specifying three domains of training, one of which is self-development. That catch all says that if you need to know it, it is your responsibility.

You know, I was never taught how to teach either, but I've been doing it for 15 years now, so I am very familiar with the "self-development" domain . Part of the problem I had when I started teaching was this training / educating dichotomy. I rapidly realized that most of my students just weren't prepared for what and how I wanted to teach, so i had to adjust to a more training based model. "Frustrating", since I was teaching in a university, doesn't even come close to it!

By the second time I taught a class, I had come to the conclusion that my students had never gone through what I would call "Basic [Academic] Training" - they couldn't write, they didn't know how to read like a scholar, and their most frequent question was "Will this be on the exam?" I *think*, I'm not sure, that a rough equivalent would be you teaching at an SNCO school and having a bright student ask you how many men where in a rifle platoon.

Every since then, I have had to assume that my students didn't have "the basics" - and that has held true for classes from Intro To.... through to graduate level courses - so I have had to structure the courses to assume that they were missing. Occassionally, all of my students have had the basics, and I have been pleasantly surprised; rapidly reworking my lectures as I go .

To get back to the original question; “what is education” I would say that education is half of the requirement to prepare soldiers for Hybrid Warfare and FSO (as stated in A Leader Development Strategy for a 21st Century Army, 25 Nov 2009). Education cannot be separated from Training if we are attempting to develop soldiers who can adapt their training to meet the demands of the current conflicts. Education is understanding the skills that one is trained on and how they interrelate, vital to understanding how to adapt those skills to uncertainty later in life.

I would agree with that with one, minor, proviso - that the training include training in how to adapt. This, to me, seems to be one of the stumbling blocks.

This brings me to another point that I would like to bring up about Training and Education in our Army. FM 7.0 states that the goal of training is mastery (paragraph 2-42). It then defines mastery as being able to perform the task intuitively without having to think about how to perform it, and being able to perform the tasks to standard regardless of the conditions.

I disagree with the first statement that mastery is not thinking. I think a true master is someone who understands the task to the level that he can adapt it to any situation. I think that is summed up in the second half of the statement about performing to standard in any condition. By linking mastery to uncertainty (unknown conditions) Education becomes necessary to being labeled a “master”. I then think that TRADOC needs to relook in FM 7.0 the ideas of Mastery to incorporate execution of the task to standard (training), and understanding the task (education) to the level that it can be adapted to any conditions.

You know, the concept of "mastery" ties directly back to that old, Guild system I was talking about earlier: Apprentice, Journeyman, Master. "Masters" or "mastery" implies someone who has internalized an area of knowledge so well that they are not only licensed to make changes in it, they are noth capable and required to do so.

Years ago, back when the guild system was really operating, in order to gain recognition of "mastery" each candidate had to produce a "master piece" (NB: TWO words, not one). This was the piece of work upon which their mastery would be decided by other masters of the guild. In academia, we have a remnant of that still with the idea of defending a thesis / dissertation, but it has disappeared in most other areas.