I think you're missing the entire point I tried to make that the definitions (and traditions, and methods) of training and education have very little to do with the cultural goals, like people with vocational lives need educations.
Its very hard to argue a business writing class could be anything but vocational training, for example. What could even remotely be educational about learning the traditions and regulations of annual company reports or recent fads in employee evaluations? Creative writing could go either way depending on if its oriented more toward the rules of the game or the general ideas / concepts / outlook of synthesizing something meaningful out of multiple ideas.
Data analysis goes either way. Of course "this is how to use R, this is how to use excel, this is how to make a graph for a presentation" is purely vocational. If you go into the theory of how to think about what and why you're doing it, that at least could be educational. Algebra is a tough one to talk about but if you're willing to talk Trig its trivial to provide vocational training (plug and chug this memorized formula to drill a bolt hole circle or survey a plot of land without understanding how it works or what it means or how to apply it to other tasks) vs educational (notice how often pi appears in trig, now why is that? Well it seems all this has something to do with unit circles. And isn't it interesting that pi is irrational, and coincidentally your trig approximations have various infinite fraction representations and there seems to be a relationship there. And when you're willing to go multidimensional, what does all this 2-D and 3-D stuff imply about higher dimensions? And why are Quaternions showing up here and what is a noncommutative division algebra anyhow? And why would a 4-dimensional number system (sorta) turn out to actually simplify rotating 3-d stuff when intuitively adding a dimension should just make it more complicated not less)
This is massively confused because we send 1/2 or so of our population for "education" but demand they merely be "trained" because what they need vocationally is, no coincidence, vocational training. And it all comes from historical cultural background where only the idle rich had the lack of need and spare time to be educated, therefore the way to be upwardly mobile is to get an education, although you'd still like a job, so better scrap the education and demand vocational training from an educational institution.
To a crude first approximation, vocational training is what gives you skills you can trade for money on the job, or perhaps if unemployed, as a hobby, but an education gives you something "worthwhile and interesting" to think about, and if you can make money off it thats nice but its not the purpose at all. One makes better workers/employees, the other at least tries to make better people.
> I think you're missing the entire point I tried to make that the definitions (and traditions, and methods) of training and education have very little to do with the cultural goals, like people with vocational lives need educations.
I think you are conflating "useful" with "vocational." Targeting education to relevancy in the real world is different than just teaching people how to use a specific tool. To illustrate the distinction, consider different areas of the humanities. Nobody would say political science is "vocational" but I'd argue that it's a lot more useful to teach that at the high-school level then to teach about ancient civilizations. Both are educational--they help people to learn to think about the world around them, but the former does so in a way that's more directly useful and relevant.
> What could even remotely be educational about learning the traditions and regulations of annual company reports or recent fads in employee evaluations.
Have you ever taken a class in business writing? They don't teach you "recent fads in employee evaluations." They teach you how to make points in clear and concise ways while supporting your arguments and tuning them to your audience. They teach in fact precisely the skills teachers use to justify the existence of creative writing classes, except they do so in a direct instead of roundabout way. My empirical observation has been that people in the real world are spectacularly bad writers. I had a very painful experience in engineering school where I was in a group writing a project proposal for a competition entry and literally couldn't understand the ideas some of my teammates were trying to communicate. But who can blame them when they've never been taught to write with an eye towards communicating ideas, but instead spent a lot of time learning about the use of alliteration, etc.
> Of course "this is how to use R, this is how to use excel, this is how to make a graph for a presentation" is purely vocational.
Sure, but you can also teach a chemistry class as "this is how you operate a titration column." But neither subject needs to be taught in a vocational way.
"They teach you how to make points in clear and concise ways while supporting your arguments and tuning them to your audience"
What makes this a business writing class, it sounds exactly like Freshman English. It also sounds exactly like the term paper requirement for my literature credit elective which was sci fi, other than sci fi class additionally required we relate somehow to sci fi. It sounds like every term paper requirement I ever had to write for every class other than not being on topic...
Maybe your anecdotes were not educated the wrong way with the wrong topics, but just simply not very well educated? Half the students have to be below median and half of them will be stuck with the below-median teachers, by definition of median and assuming random distribution, and the result is likely to be some peculiar results from "educated" people. Or at least some weird anecdotes.
Its possible that for-profit business pressures at the school pushed poor teachers into creative writing instead of biz writing which got the good teachers. That may even be a universal cultural phenomena across the country, those pressures exist, math teachers really do seem as a class to be smarter than gym teachers and there are sound business reasons it has to be that way. But blaming the topic for employee results isn't going to change employee results, you'll just have more people signing up for biz writing requiring the village idiots to be reassigned from the now empty creative writing classes into biz writing, leading eventually to mysterious pondering about why biz writing class used to be great and now on average its not so good.
You can hope for an educational curriculum for poli sci but that might be a little abstract for all high school students. I suspect you'd be stuck with trivia or indoctrination, checkmark the year was Marx born, write a short answer about why America is great, who is the mayor of our city at this time, etc. Vocational poli sci would be "how to be an effective campaign manager" which might be interesting. Or just plain old "how to become a politician" class. True, very few grads will become POTUS but quite a few might end up local aldermen, board members, council members, or mayors over their lifetimes.
> What makes this a business writing class, it sounds exactly like Freshman English. It also sounds exactly like the term paper requirement for my literature credit elective which was sci fi, other than sci fi class additionally required we relate somehow to sci fi. It sounds like every term paper requirement I ever had to write for every class other than not being on topic...
These are different styles of writing, emphasizing related but not fungible skills. A business writing class focuses much more heavily on being concise, persuasive, and tailoring your writing for your target audience. I wrote a lot of term papers for a lot of humanities classes in college, and these skills were only indirectly implicated, not the central focus.
> Maybe your anecdotes were not educated the wrong way with the wrong topics, but just simply not very well educated?
Possible, but unlikely. Whatever the various high school rankings are worth, mine appears in the top 5/10 (in the U.S.) of most of them. The problem was the curriculum, and indirectly the teachers who brought with them a romanticized academic mindset. Your comments are essentially illustrative of that mindset: a snobbish overestimation of the importance of literature, etc, combined with rationalizations about how studying those subjects nonetheless indirectly develops relevant skills. This basic approach to education is fundamentally flawed. It's the product of PhD's in various fields who think a grade 6-12 education should consist of little tastes of a variety of those fields, and rationalize that approach by claiming that people will pick up relevant skills in the process, or "learn to learn" or something similarly vacuous.
To circle back to the writing example, there is no reason other than snobbery that literature classes are taught in grades 6-12 while business writing classes are not. Even though kids, too lost in learning about metaphors and allegories and whatnot to pick up any real writing skills, predictably graduate without being able to write effectively, it never occurs to anyone to say: "gee, if we want kids to know how to write, maybe we should teach them how to write!"
Its very hard to argue a business writing class could be anything but vocational training, for example. What could even remotely be educational about learning the traditions and regulations of annual company reports or recent fads in employee evaluations? Creative writing could go either way depending on if its oriented more toward the rules of the game or the general ideas / concepts / outlook of synthesizing something meaningful out of multiple ideas.
Data analysis goes either way. Of course "this is how to use R, this is how to use excel, this is how to make a graph for a presentation" is purely vocational. If you go into the theory of how to think about what and why you're doing it, that at least could be educational. Algebra is a tough one to talk about but if you're willing to talk Trig its trivial to provide vocational training (plug and chug this memorized formula to drill a bolt hole circle or survey a plot of land without understanding how it works or what it means or how to apply it to other tasks) vs educational (notice how often pi appears in trig, now why is that? Well it seems all this has something to do with unit circles. And isn't it interesting that pi is irrational, and coincidentally your trig approximations have various infinite fraction representations and there seems to be a relationship there. And when you're willing to go multidimensional, what does all this 2-D and 3-D stuff imply about higher dimensions? And why are Quaternions showing up here and what is a noncommutative division algebra anyhow? And why would a 4-dimensional number system (sorta) turn out to actually simplify rotating 3-d stuff when intuitively adding a dimension should just make it more complicated not less)
This is massively confused because we send 1/2 or so of our population for "education" but demand they merely be "trained" because what they need vocationally is, no coincidence, vocational training. And it all comes from historical cultural background where only the idle rich had the lack of need and spare time to be educated, therefore the way to be upwardly mobile is to get an education, although you'd still like a job, so better scrap the education and demand vocational training from an educational institution.
To a crude first approximation, vocational training is what gives you skills you can trade for money on the job, or perhaps if unemployed, as a hobby, but an education gives you something "worthwhile and interesting" to think about, and if you can make money off it thats nice but its not the purpose at all. One makes better workers/employees, the other at least tries to make better people.