There's an
old saying, usually attributed to Confucius, that goes something like
"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish,
and you've fed him for a lifetime." There's an important life lesson in
that simple statement. Some people translate it conceptually into something
like "Education is the most important thing you can give someone to better
his circumstances." For me I don’t believe this gets to the heart of the
matter.
The
translation I like goes something like this:
Give a man
the answer, and he'll only have a temporary solution. Teach him the principles
that led you to that answer, and he will be able to create his own solutions in
the future.
It's
considerably less catchy, of course, but I think this is the true meaning of
Confucius’s statement.
Suppose
someone is trained on how to create a simple graphic in Excel. No doubt he or
she will be quite able to create a graphic, but they will have problems doing
other things because they have not been educated about the many functionalities
and applications of Excel.
Then suppose
you have someone else, someone who has been educated about Excel’s full
capabilities. This person understands the major concepts that underpin Excel’s
functionalities and made them necessary in the first place.
This second
person will be able to apply their background knowledge, and compound it with
creativity, to find solutions to problems they have not encountered before and
they can inventively use Excel to do things they have never been trained to do.
You train
someone to do something. It is task-oriented. It is skill-based. You can train
someone to increase their proficiency. But in essence, you get what you put
into it. A trained person may get faster, but they’re unlikely to find a truly
new and better way to do something. Because training has a skill-based focus;
it does not provide the depth needed for creative problem solving and
innovation.
You train
people for performance. You educate people for understanding.
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