Evan Smith / University of Missouri
I cannot pretend to cover everything on this topic in one essay. There are numerous histories, world events, and indeed blogs on the subject. Let us consider some of the factors involved.
Education has long been for the privileged few, sometimes a divinity-school driven endeavor requiring knowledge of ancient languages, history, and philosophy. In that one ended up being a minister or professor in many instances, it could have been called a form of career preparation or training. Lecture (Latin lectura means reading [aloud]), literacy, and much 19th-century classroom recitation have changed greatly over the centuries. Over time, new careers such as journalism and health sciences came to be, and financial aid and the post-WW2 GI Bill helped students enroll and complete. The current situation in the USA is that one declares a major by junior year and may even be professionalized by then, even wearing uniforms for a lab, clinic, or other activities. While perhaps built on traditional liberal art fields, these professions apply concepts even before graduation; so does, e.g., study abroad.
If one teaches at any level, one implicitly or directly prepares others to teach, and the cycle goes on, with some innovations and individualized teaching styles.
In the 1960s-70s, students wanted “relevance,” courses on current events or reinvestigations of the past. This had to contribute to revisionism in many fields. Yet there was still an emphasis on grades good enough to get you a job or to get you into graduate school, medicine, or law. Some have said that the college graduating classes of the 1970s needed a master’s to get a “good job.” In that vein, Merisotis (2015, p. 63) says, “Let us not forget the art history student who studied Michelangelo at Johns Hopkins and ended up flipping burgers.” Elite or humanistic studies may apply to the workaday environment in some form, but often to a job one could have had with just a high school diploma.
Training is very practical, frequently starting in high school or earlier with “shop” classes and the like, jobs that, for the economy of the time, required no more than a high school diploma. College offers more socially than many trade schools and continues, if only because of, e.g., computer science and agriculture, to attract many to a comfortable environment. Still, many students start at community colleges as commuters and have little time for the extras.
Terminology surfaces again. “On-the-job training” has been around for long time to mean apprenticeships and the like. I have heard graduate students use the term to refer to a field methods class. It is also appropriate for describing internships and practica.
Since “school” can be used to mean (post-) secondary school, piano school, or even graduate work, it is easy to confuse education and training. Similarly, “college” can appear in phrases like community college (formerly junior college in many MO-KAN-SAN regions), College of Education, and even beauty college.
When online education is critiqued, education and training can result in more confusion but more productively in talk of gainful employment, sometimes listed in catalogs to assure students of a good job market. However, outcomes are especially important to critics and observers of this electronically driven form: Who completes? Who gets jobs? What do employers think? How are career prospects and professional licensure transfer disclosed to students?
Of course, many say that today’s students will have jobs not yet invented due to ever-growing technological and/or service needs. We can educate—or train—basic skills for the future. Few knew the value of computers in the 1970s, but such machines have grown into home computers, cell phones, etc., causing instructors to keep up with the new Joneses–younger students. Where one may have filled out an “app” to get into school, now one adds “apps” to a cell in school or not. Vendors are very much involved today, as are open resources, whereas in the 1960s, we were concerned, in that regard, about only the textbook publisher’s ancillaries, the filmstrip company, and standardized tests, none of which were commonly used for entertainment or general communication by students. Social media can be used in many ways, and game technology can enhance historical recreations of battle scenes on television.
Hybrids exist aplenty, not only mixes of online work and f2f sessions, but also the adoption of online resources, if only an LMS, and newer learning theories in brick-and-mortar classes. Perhaps with hybridization, we have to expect (online) education and training to overlap, too.
If we work toward the future, then that brings us back full circle: careful and client-driven preparation in varied formats.
Reference
Merisotis, J. (2015). America Needs Talent: Attracting, Educating & Deploying the 21st-Century Workforce. RosettaBooks.