That Won't Wear Out Study of the humanities remains the cornerstone of Stanford's undergraduate curriculum. Recently, one of these billboards captured my attention. It wasn't very clear what product this billboard was advertising, but its intent was obvious. It urged parents to replace the time-honored tradition of learning a foreign language with the more immediately profitable study of the language of Wall Street. Perhaps the biggest problem with this billboard is that it confuses education and training.
Education involves developing a passion and skill for acquiring new knowledge.
Education, especially a university education, serves as a foundation for life. Training involves the development of a skill, with the anticipation that the skill will be put to near-term use in fulfillment of a specific task. It isn't useful for very much else, and with technological advances it may well become unnecessary in the future. Having made that distinction, I don't mean to imply that a liberal education has no practical applications. Our new provost, John Etchemendy, is fond of pointing out that studying the humanities teaches skills that can be broadly applied, in different settings and, crucially, as the demands and expectations in life and career change.