Learning, at its core

I quote from a commentary by Rob Jenkins in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

A university education once consisted of four (or more) years of reading and studying the great works of history, philosophy, religion, science, mathematics, and the arts. Only after becoming thoroughly familiar with the collective learning of his world did a "bachelor" begin training for his chosen profession, like law or medicine, often by apprenticing himself to a highly regarded practitioner.

The last remaining vestige of that system — which may have been cumbersome but produced highly literate people — is the so-called core curriculum, which now occupies not even a full two years of a student's education. The rest, generally speaking, isn't education at all; it's training.

... That's what training is: learning to perform routine functions efficiently without having to spend much time thinking about them.

Education, on the other hand, although complementary to training, is in many ways its antithesis. If the point of training is to teach people to act without having to stop and think, then the point of education is, expressly, to teach people to stop and think.