Institutional Innovation

I was asked to comment on difference between education, training, learning

george | August 24, 2009

I used to be concerned in this direction when making a transition from working in industrial training and development education to working in educational development roles in higher education.

All categorisations of this sort serve to channel people and institutions into differently funded and privileged regimes. There are no essentials of this sort. Conceptual categories are constructed. These constructions do have agentive force in networks of inference or meaning (epistemologies, actor networks, discourses). They may be useful tools of development. They may also be part of a colonial apparatus of social control.

For this reason institutions like the JISC aligns itself with “higher education” while Becta aligns itself more with high school, further education and training. So an inverted way of defining these terms is to see who funds or supports instances of named interventions, in what context.

The terms can be conflated: e.g.:
http://www.marcprensky.com/dgbl/Prensky%20-%20Selected%20URLs%28web%29.htm

Some of my key texts were:

Ahier, J. & Esland, G. (1999). Education, Training and the Future of Work I: Social, political and economic contexts of policy development. London: Routledge in association with the Open University.
Ball, S. (1990). Industrial training or new vocationalism? Structures and discourses. In Politics and Policy Making in Education. London: Routledge.

A later work by Avis continues in this vein:

Avis, J. (2006). From reproduction to learning cultures: post‐compulsory education in England. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27(3), 341-354. doi: Article.

It is conventional to differentiate between education and training using aphorisms, e.g.: training teaches you how; education teaches you why. See e.g.:

Higher education is often differentiated from further education by using the concept of “criticality” as a discriminator. various e.g.:

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