We Should be Training Dogs and Educating People

One of the best decisions I ever made was to take a course in typing when I was in Grade 9. That was in the days of monster manual typewriters, when pounding out words on the keys was a great stress release. F-J-F-space. F-J-F-K-F space. The repetition of keystrokes was drilled into me until I instinctively knew where the letters are to be found. In the years (and decades) since that course, I have used my typing skills almost every day. It's like second nature for me to type. I learned the value of good training through that experience. Being a semi-skilled typist has made my life much easier.

But training such as this has its limits. I could employ my skill to type almost anything---stupid things, inane things, irrelevant things. My training as a typist, while valuable, did not teach me what to write. Having the skill was only a portion---and a small portion at that---of what I needed to know for my skill to be used well.

Knowing what to write is a higher level activity that requires more than the rote muscle memory of where the keys are found on my keyboard. To know what to write requires knowledge, the ability to think deeply, persistence, the ability to analyze data, and so much more. It requires experience, reading, thinking. It requires EDUCATION.

This simple example illustrates something that has been troubling me for some time. In our pragmatic, production-oriented society, it seems that there is a growing fascination with "training" (that is, teaching and learning skills) and a corresponding devaluation of "education" (that is, understanding what should be done and why). This pervasive trend is having a dramatic effect upon attitudes toward teaching and learning at all levels. It seems that technique has triumphed over truth.

Training in its proper place can be valuable; but humans require something more to be fully human. Training feeds the economy, but education has the potential to feed the mind and the soul. Skills are great; but knowing how, when and why to deploy them---and to what end---requires something more.

It is, it seems to me, especially troubling when this fascination with training invades the Church and shunts education to the margins. Of all places, the Church should resist the simple mimicking of society's obsessions and insist upon the value of pursuing truth rather than technique,

and of feeding the soul rather than feeding our production of whatever it is that we "produce." We need to think carefully about what we are seeking to accomplish. But that takes more than skills and training; it requires knowledge, understanding and wisdom which all are a product of education.

This should not really come as a surprise. After all, the apostle Paul did not write, "Be transformed by the renewal of your skills (or training)," but "Be transformed by the renewal of your mind..." That renewal of the mind is the task of education, rigorous education...Christian education. And I know that within the tradition in which I grew up and have worked for decades, education is in decline. It is being pushed to the margins as "training" becomes the flavour of the week. In the narrowing corporate model that is in the ascendancy, training is great for developing skills but not so much for helping us to discern what we should be doing and why we should be doing it.

Christian history also teaches us that "education" in the broad sense was fundamental to the survival of the faith. It would have been easy for the early Christians simply to set themselves apart from the Greco-Roman culture in which they were embedded to become a minor, freakish cult that simply faded away. But if we look at the history of the Church we find that the path chosen was to engage with the culture, to embrace the challenge of articulating the Gospel message in terms that outsiders might understand--even if they did not accept it. This required not training, but education. Thus we find that many of the most impactful Christians through the centuries have been highly educated. People like St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and countless others had such a profound impact upon their culture and upon the Church in part because they were able to think their way through the morass of ideas. They could articulate the faith in ways that stretched their listeners. I am astonished at the profundity of the sermons of many of these Christians. There was no pious mush or pop psychology to be found; their preaching was grounded in Scripture and shaped by the best thinking and learning available, joined together with a deep piety.

My point is really quite simple: if the Church abandons education in favour of training, it will condemn itself to the tyranny of technique and have nothing relevant to say to the world. We shall lose our way. We simply will parrot old cliches and sing our happy, sappy songs into irrelevance and oblivion. Training, after all, is for dogs; people need education.