At a meeting of retired and retiring faculty today, one person recalled a conversation with a corporate officer from the region on the subject of hiring our graduates. The corporate person drew a distinction between two approaches to schooling young people:

"We can train your graduates if you have already educated them," he said, "but we can't educate them if you only trained them."

Most educators would instinctively accept the difference, I think, even though its real meaning goes unstated in the anecdote. On one side, perhaps the ability to follow procedures, to attend to decorum, to accomplish goals set by others, and on the other side, the ability to deal with uncertainty, to think critically, to bring revelevant information to solving a problem? The corporate officer was implying a model of adulthood and career that included both sets of values, a model in which education is the necessary foundation for training -- again, at the risk of using his undefined terms.

Training, when it takes place in schools, looks kind of like education; maybe we're fooled sometime into thinking we're doing the one when we've slid over into the other's territory. Teachers need time to reflect and to talk with each other about issues like this one; otherwise you find teachers working more or less in isolation from their peers doing odder and odder things and making mistakes they shouldn't be making. Their morale goes down and their get burned out, too. On a bad day, their style of teaching becomes cramped and suspicious, which won't work when your job is about inspiration and motivation and helping people become better versions of themselves.

PS. My father the retired accountant quickly complicated the discussion later by asking how I'd like engineers to be prepared for the workplace, a useful line of thought.