Surprise, surprise …

As More Attend College, Majors Become More Career-Focused - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Albert Jay Nock predicted this in his 1930 book The System of Education in the United States. Nock distinguishes between education and training and notes that just about everyone is trainable, but that not everyone is educable. Since in America what is thought to be good for anybody is presumed to be good for everybody, the only way to make education available to everyone is to call training education and to make all schools training schools. We see the result all around. The President, members of Congress, the justices on the Supreme Court are highly trained in something. But how many of them are really educated? The difference, by the way, between education and training is that the former is formative and has to do with character, while the latter is instrumental and has to do with technique. As Nock puts it, applied to the proper subject, education produces something in the way of an Emerson; training, applied to the proper subject, produces something in the way of an Edison.