I was reading in my commonplace book this morning and ran across this quote from Wendell Berry. It come from his essay “Discipline and Hope” published in the 1972 collection: A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural:
Training is a process of conditioning, an orderly and highly efficient procedure by which a man learns a prescribed pattern of facts and functions. Education, on the other hand, is an obscure process by which a person’s experience is brought into contact with his place and his history. A college can train a person in four years; it can barely begin his education in that time. A person’s education begins before his birth in the making of the disciplines, traditions, and attitudes of mind that he will inherit, and it continues until his death under the slow, expensive, uneasy tutelage of his experience. The process that produces astronauts may produce soldiers and factory workers and clerks; it will never produce good farmers or good artists or good citizens or good parents.
Berry, always the prophet, saw what was coming, especially concerning American higher education.
Yes. Years ago we briefly had a special Dean of Instruction or something, his mandate being being to get all the faculty on the same most modern page as far as pedagogy and philosophy was concerned. He was all about “training,” and of course quantifiable assessment of how well we were doing training the students. I told him I wasn’t here to “train” anyone, that training was how you got seals to balance spinning balls on their noses. I was here to educate people. I enjoyed making his life difficult for the duration of his tenure, reducing every one of his sessions where he tried to “train” us to become more efficient trainers to a philosophical debate about what our fundamental project in fact was.
“And this is the reason, why it is more correct, as well as more usual to speak of a University as a place of education, than of instruction . . . education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character.” John Henry Newman, _The Idea of a University_