Training vs Education

Professor Flowers’ model of education is perfect for the modern word. With the possibility of outsourcing technical tasks to machines, education is no longer synonymous with training. Machines can perform calculus operations for us, but it takes a human to learn how to apply calculus to improve the world. Machines provide models of the human brain, but it takes a human to apply facts about human cognition to pose questions about ethics—how things should be. You can even find examples of machines’ training leading to human success outside of scientific research. Wayne Gretzky, a famous hockey player, once said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Only humans can take facts about the universe and, through critical thinking, gain wisdom about the world and our place in it. However, we must not discard the importance of machines. Education provides advantages, but training is a commodity we require to learn. As Woodie Flowers puts it, “A poet who learns Mother Nature’s laws likely becomes a better poet,” or, in stronger terms, “At some point you must face that anti-science is pro-stupid.” In Professor Flowers’ view, we must stop lecturing, outsource training to machines, and use our time to start mentoring—a straightforward action plan for engaging with technology.

Once we distinguish education and training, we can also replace the traditional model of t-shaped education—pursuing shallow understanding of a broad variety of topics and deep understanding of one field—with tree-shaped education. On one side of the tree are training skills that can be outsourced to machines: accounting, statistics, mechanics, etc. On the other side are topics humans ought to learn, in fields such as art, civics, sociology, and philosophy.