Society Snippet - What's the difference between training and education?

What's the difference between training and education?

This is an often-discussed topic, and I do not claim to have any new information. When I was studying economics in university, one of the lectures touched on this and gave an answer from economic's point of view. Training is specific and usually offers little direct value beyond the workplace, whereas education usually provides transferrable skills in other workplaces or in life, and so the employee should also contribute towards the cost.

It's not a bad answer but is too narrow and confined to the "who pays for it" aspect of the question. I want to re-think an answer based on the current education & training landscape and people's opinions.

10 years on since that economic answer was given, there are a lot more education & training channels online, including university-sponsored course portals such as Coursera, corporate-internal training portals for their employees, industry or field-specific for-fee training courses like Treehouse, gamified apps like Duolingo, and course listing platforms like Udemy or teachable. These channels are content-intensive, curating a lot of course materials to instruct, coach and test on specific skills. If you subscribe to an online software coding course, you will read lectures, followed by exercises which you may seek help from fellow students or tutors, and you may also be tested to ensure you have grasped the concepts and the associated practical skills.

Needless to say, the success of these content-intensive sites is due to users' desire to learn new skills directly relevant to their existing or new job roles, hobbies or concerns that would benefit from more rigorous information-intake than reading news articles or websites (such as nutrition), and general interest in their daily life (such as taking an intro course into machine learning after reading from newspaper). However, despite all these new channels, people are still complaining about the out-datedness of the mainstream education system - primary and secondary schools, universities, their selection & competition criteria, the curricula, teaching methods, and how they are funded. There seems to be a gap between the unregulated adult/leisure learning vs. the regulated industry which is fundamental to citizens' well being.

The current criticisms on mainstream education system is that the mentality is frozen in the late 19th century, with excessive focus on learning information, heavily partitioned subjects, competition through exams, and mass education provision that does not account for each person's capabilities and suitability. In some extreme cases, the narrow range of subjects and the primacy of exams mean that students are learning purely for the sake of getting to the top, the content of education has become mere "currency" that is dealt out in the great exam game.

However, would a typical parent drop out of mainstream education system? There is a rise in popularity of home schooling, but it is still a minority. Would top private schools spear-head an upside-down change in how they arrange subjects, how they teach, and how they value external exams and university competitions? Quite unlikely. Parents and private schools add value alike through providing more tutoring for students who need to catch up, adjust the method of instruction based on what their small class of students are suited to, and provide more extra-curricular learning (music, sports, literature) to enrich their education. But other than these supplementary measures, everyone toes the existing methods under the current macro setting.

Of course, the macro setting is for the education authorities and governments to set. But under the current (and prolonged) economic uncertainties and heightened competition among countries, the emphases on productivity-yielding subjects and assessment-centric education methods are on the rise, so as to generate young minds who can go into high-value employment and start working immediately. Gone are the days when people would study a history degree before taking a master in jurisprudence, and gone are the days when teachers have free time to teach topics not on the syllabus or spend more time to experiment with new teaching methods. When students are assessed every month and they are expected to attain a specific standard, all the freedom is squeezed out by time pressure and lack of imaginative space in schools.

So despite all these complaints and the macro setting becoming more skill-oriented, the general population would rather send themselves and their children to school, and the expensive part time and distance learning degree courses are as popular as ever. Does this hold the clue towards differentiating education training?

If so, my hypothesis would be that education provides an immersive environment that goes beyond the string of skills directly imparted to the student from the course materials. In a full time primary or secondary school, you are learning more than what the subject syllabus is designed to teach you - you get to make friends, discuss irrelevant affairs in between (or during) lessons, participate in after-school activities, and hang out together during holidays. But it's not just these human interactions that add flavour to the experience, the course structure itself also synergise for more value-add. There is a difference between studying an "Intro to Accounting" short course versus studying the same course in the context of an MBA degree, during which you would be studying "Intro to economics" and "Basic Management" and afterwards you would be expected to study "Operations Management". Even if you are studying a distance learning MBA, this kind of course management would have imposed a structure and immersive environment on you that distinguishes an MBA study from a loose set of short courses that you pick up over the same time period.

There is also another distinction. When you pick up online courses short courses, they are expected to be all inclusive, meaning that you go through the course material (video, presentation, notes etc) and you should have obtained the target content and be ready to try out the tasks. In a more formal university education, the prepared materials only form part of the course content - you are expected to go beyond the notes and read from the latest papers or chapters from textbooks. This gives you a variety of perspectives and narratives for the same topic, multiplying the dimensions of immersion. If you need to work on essay-type assignments or a thesis, then the need to read widely to distill some ideas is even more acute.

To summarise, despite the increasing emphasis on skills and training by the governments, the value of education in the form of immersive environment provided beyond the mandatory skills is treasured by parents and students, such that they remained popular and had been shielded from direct competition with online channels. It's not in an ideal situation, but it is still the most suitable amongst the options.

Here comes the question - can we start developing another way of delivering the immersive environment, so that students can get the best of both worlds, i.e. they learn from new methodologies that are more relevant to the current world, and yet benefit from this immersive environment?