education and training

A. Education and Training

To understand the nature of the liberal arts college and its function in our society, it is important to understand the difference between education and training.

Training is intended primarily for the service of society; education is primarily for the individual. Society needs doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers to perform specific tasks necessary to its operation, just as it needs carpenters and plumbers and stenographers. Training supplies the immediate and specific needs of society so that the work of the world may continue. And these needs, our training centers - the professional and trade schools - fill. But although education is for the improvement of the individual, it also serves society by providing a leavening of men of understanding, of perception, and wisdom. They are our intellectual leaders, the critics of our culture, the defenders of our free traditions, the instigators of our progress. They serve society by examining its function, appraising its needs, and criticizing its direction. They may be earning their livings by practicing one of the professions, or in pursuing a trade, or by engaging in business enterprise. They may be rich or poor. They may occupy positions of power and prestige, or they may be engaged in some humble employment. Without them, however, society either disintegrates or else becomes an anthill.

The difference between the two types of study is like the difference between the discipline and exercise in a professional baseball training camp and that of a Y gym. In the one, the recruit is training to become a professional baseball player who will make a living and serve society by playing baseball; in the other, he is training only to improve his own body and musculature. The training at the baseball camp is all relevant. The recruit may spend hours practicing how to slide into second base, not because it is a particularly useful form of calisthenics but because it is relevant to the game. The exercise would stop if the rules were changed so that sliding to a base was made illegal. Similarly, the candidate for the pitching staff spends a lot of time throwing a baseball, not because it will improve his physique - it may have quite the opposite effect - but because pitching is to be his principal function on the team. At the Y gym, exercises have no such relevance. The intention is to strengthen the body in general, and when the members sit down on the floor with their legs outstretched and practice touching their fingers to their toes, it is not because they hope to become galley slaves, perhaps the only occupation where that particular exercise would be relevant.

In general, relevancy is a facet of training rather than of education. What is taught at law school is the present law of the land, not the Napoleonic Code or even the archaic laws that have been scratched from the statute books. And at medical school, too, it is modern medical practice that is taught, that which is relevant to conditions today. And the plumber and the carpenter and the electrician and the mason learn only what is relevant to the practice of their respective trades in this day with the tools and materials that are presently available and that conform to the building code.

In the liberal arts college, on the other hand, the student is encouraged to explore new fields and old fields, to wander down the bypaths of knowledge. There the teaching is concerned with major principles, and its purpose is to change the student, to make him something different from what he was before, just as the purpose of the Y gym is to make a fat man into a thin one, or a strong one out of a weak one.

Clearly the two types of learning overlap. Just as the baseball recruit gets rid of excess weight and

tightens his muscles at the baseball camp and thereby profits even if he does not make the team, so the law student sharpens his mind and broadens his understanding, even if he subsequently fails the bar exam and goes on to make his living in an entirely different kind of work. His study of law gives him an understanding of the rules under which our society functions and his practice in solving legal problems gives him an understanding of fine distinctions.

On the other hand, the Y member, whose original reason for joining may have been solely to get himself in shape, may get caught up in the institution's baseball program and find that his skill has developed to the point where he can play the game professionally. Similarly, the student who undertakes a course of study merely because it interests him and he wants to know more about it may find that it has commercial value. He has studied a foreign language and literature in order to understand the society that produced it, and then he may find that his special knowledge enables him to get a job as a translator. Or he may find that while his knowledge of chemistry is not of professional caliber, it is still sufficient to give him preference in a particular job over someone who lacks even that modicum of knowledge of the subject. But these are accidental and incidental. In general, certain courses of study are for the service of society and other courses are for self-improvement. In the hierarchy of our educational system, the former are the function of our professional schools and the latter are the function of the college of liberal arts.

- Harry Kemelman

Notes:

Harry Kemelman (November 24, 1908 — December 15, 1996) was an American mystery writer and a professor of English. He was the creator of one of the most famous religious sleuths, Rabbi David Small.