Gay Marriage

[Occhidiangela]

Not confusing education and training. It is far too easy to do. (Late thought: someone wise, it might have been Griselda or Pete or Shadow, described education as opening the floodgates of a person's natural curiosity and giving it an initial direction.)

Educating a person is like teaching a young kid how to play in tennis. You start with the simple mechanics, skills, which is a training task, but the real art of, for example, serving is in applying your serves tactically on the tennis court. That is the education part, preparing the child to grow his game once you have given him both the fundamentals and theory on how to apply them. How and why to mix serves, deceive, spin, and to place the ball. You practice the mechanics, but you never stop learning and experimenting with the serve as it fits into your whole tennis game. The education includes how to stay fit and flexible so you can make the shots you need to make in a match. The beginning of that learning is training, preparing the body to go do things on its own in the game that are not simple stretches or pushups. Maybe that is a weak analogy.

While standard test scores do assess knowledge level standards for the bulk of the students, the risk run is to stop at the training level and to down play the education. Task training is easier to quantify in a metric, education takes some years to manifest its benefit, and does not fit on a Power Point™ presentation very neatly. While training and education are related, it is far easier for people who have to make hard budget decisions to claim that it makes more sense to train, since they can show numerically how successful the system appears to be, than to educate.

Sort of like accountants running a car manufacturing company. Hmmmm, maybe they do already! :o

I'm raving, back to my coffee.

Occhi