Editorial - Education or Training? - Accounts of Chemical Research

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ACCOUNTS OF CHEXIC'AL RESEARCH" Registered in U S . Patent and Trademark Office; Copyright 1986 by the American Chemical Society

VOLUME 19 EDITOR

FRED W. McLAFFERTY ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Barbara A. Baird John E. McMurry EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Robert Abeles Richard Bernstein R. Stephen Berry Michel Boudart Maurice M. Bursey Charles R. Cantor Ernest R. Davidson Marshall Fixman Jenny P. Glusker Keith U. Ingold Maurice M. Kreevoy Theodore Kuwana Stephen J. Lippard James M. McBride Josef Michl Kenneth N. Raymond Jacob F. Schaefer Richard C. Schoonmaker

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NUMBER 9

SEPTEMBER, 1986

Education or Training? At the national meeting of the American Chemical Society last April, there was a symposium to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ACS Committee on Professional Training (CPT). T h e impact of the C P T has been considerable and on the whole constructive. I t has been an effective yet gentle force to uphold or increase the substance and rigor of American college chemistry curricula. By setting standards that chemistry departments are urged to meet, it has provided guidance to some who wanted it and has put pressure on others to strengthen their offerings. There have been complaints that C P T is dictatorial, that it has imposed a rigid, uniform curriculum on American colleges and universities. While such criticisms cannot be dismissed, the committee has in general been sufficiently flexible in its guidelines and tactful in its administration of them so that any assertion that it has suppressed curricular innovation seems extreme. There is however one troublesome aspect of CPT: its name. The word "training" connotes the teaching of skills or of standard responses to defined situations, in the manner of military training. Although training has its place, even in chemistry, CPT has assumed unto itself the more significant domain of chemical education. Thus one of its major documents is entitled "Undergraduate Professional Education in Chemsitry: Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures". The distinction between "training" and "education" is often blurred, but it is no mere semantic exercise. The educated man or woman has an understanding of the world and of principles that enables him or her to deal with problems not by means of standardized responses but rather on the basis of knowledge, perspective and reasoning. Concretely, the distinction may relate to what sort of job responsibility a person is trained/educated for. If the job to be done is, say, to operate an instrument or even to manage an instrumental analysis service department, the employer may indeed prefer someone who has been trained, for that person would know instantly what to do when, say, an instrument malfunctions. But if the employer seeks a person who can provide leadership, scientific or administrative, true education will be sought. Although top executives generally prefer to recruit educated people, there are strong incentives to emphasize training. The department manager who is under pressure to do a big job in a few months wants to hire someone who can do effective work immediately after coming to work, and doesn't much care whether the person hired will be a good leader 10 years later. That tends to increase demand (and salaries) for trained personnel. The high starting salaries paid to graduates in some fields attract the attention of parents. Teenagers may be pressured to train for such fields rather than entering others that would provide a better education. For talented students, education is superior to training, for the interests of society, and for the careers of the students. This prominent ACS committee should therefore be renamed the Committee on Professional Educational In subtle ways, the name can matter. Joseph F. Bunnett University of California, Santa Cruz (1) Essentially this point was made a t the symposium by A. Truman Schwartz of Macalester College.