Chemical Education Today
Editorial
W
Education versus Training A statement by Dick Zare in his commentary “Changing the Federal–University Partnership” ( J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75, 16–17) started me thinking about our current approaches to both graduate and undergraduate programs. He said, Doctoral students should not be trained primarily to be the future members of the professoriate.… Real progress would be made if there were a more explicit recognition that Ph.D.’s would be better trained as creative problem solvers who can pursue a large number of options for useful, satisfying careers.
For now I would like to leave aside the question of how students can be trained primarily for the professoriate if there is little or no pedagogical component to their training. Rather, I will concentrate on the issue of education versus training. I assign different meanings to these two words, and I think the difference is an important one. Training to me means a narrowly focused program that leads to high proficiency in a specific skill. It prepares a student for one particular job or activity but provides neither broad perspective nor flexibility of approach. On the other hand, education enables students to see the forest and the trees. It encourages general approaches to problem solving and inculcates ways of thinking that are productive, effective, and rewarding. An education prepares a student to deal with and solve a broad range of problems, and to choose which problems are important and which are not. Even though his definitions of the words may differ from mine, Zare clearly implies that Ph.D.’s are being trained, not educated. If true, this is a major problem for our discipline. My own Ph.D. program encouraged and enhanced my ability to learn on my own. My mentor, Ralph Pearson, provided an environment within which I could develop habits of the mind that have served well ever since. For example, most of what I know about helping students to learn was discovered experimentally, with no teacher directly involved. The approach was similar to what one would do in any kind of research, though the problem was a good deal harder than most. As in most research, each experiment raised many more questions than it answered, but real progress was made as well. Twenty five years ago Tom Lippincott wrote in an editorial in this Journal, “…perhaps we can admit that our spectacular successes in improved training of science majors have not been matched by corresponding successes in their education.” He argued that a change in how we teach, not what W The
text of Tom Lippincott’s editorial (J. Chem. Educ. 1973, 50, 87) is available on JCE Online at http:/jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/ Journal/Issues/1998/Feb/edit.html.
we teach, was in order. I In a world in which recommend that you read that editorial, because its change is the norm, suggestions are as applionly an educated cable today as they were 25 student has been years ago. Most of us have yet to change how we properly equipped to teach, even at the graduate prosper. This means level. (We have put the editorial into JCE Online at that students need to http://jchemed.chem. be able to identify wisc.edu/ as supplementary and define problems, material.) I think we ought to be to solve them educating—not training— imaginatively, and to both undergraduate and apply the chemistry graduate students. In a world in which change is they learn to a the norm, only an educated variety of contexts in student has been properly other disciplines. equipped to prosper. This means that students need to be able to identify and define problems, to solve them imaginatively, and to apply the chemistry they learn in a variety of contexts in other disciplines. Students will not learn to do this unless we encourage and require it. We need to provide practice in approaching real problems, rewards for persistence in attempting a variety of potential solutions, and reassurance that a scientific approach is the best means discovered to date to deal with difficult problems. But what if students are not up to the task? Failure and discouragement could negate all the advantages of true education. A supportive environment and judicious choice of level and difficulty of problems are essential. Group rather than individual problem solving also can help. And, given a chance to demonstrate it, students may be more capable than we, or they, expect. In the words of Emily Dickinson, We never know how high we are Till we are called to rise And then if we are true to plan Our statures touch the skies.
True education involves drawing out the innate qualities of students, helping them to develop their own understanding, and nourishing their minds to achieve the greatest possible stature. It is a difficult goal to achieve, but one that is well worth our best efforts.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 2 February 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
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