"Throughout history education has been the path to freedom.
In class societies, the upper classes are educated, while the masses who serve
them are, at best, trained.
"Training consists of narrow skills and expertise in a
specialization, while education is
broad understanding of many fields, the history of humanity, and above all, the
ability to think on the broad scale and see details in the context of human history,
philosophy, ideas, the powerful stories of literature and media, technology,
etc.....
"For example, the education of Abraham Lincoln was rooted in
the Bible, Shakespeare and Euclid. This was education, not training. Lincoln
later sought training, but the education came first. Consider the audience that
sat for hours and hours listening to the Lincoln-Douglass debate [as noted by
Neil Postman], or their progenitor farmers who read and debated The Federalist Papers--these people were educated....
"Of course, training is a good thing. But there is a huge difference
between a society with a few educated and the masses trained, and one where the
masses are both educated and trained. But a highly-trained and poorly-educated
population, as Allan Bloom said in The
Closing of the American Mind, is a problem--as Nazi Germany proved."
