What’s the difference between technology training vs. technology education?

Let’s talk about the difference between technology training vs. technology education. To illustrate this distinction, imagine you’re with a group of handymen. However, the only tools they have are a bunch of hammers. Unfortunately, you have a pile of screws, not nails, that need to be taken care of right now.

So, you politely point out to these workers that their hammers won’t really work for this particular task. You need to turn screws, not hammer nails. In response, they accuse you of being anti-hammer. Then, before you can respond, they accuse you of being anti-tool … and even anti-technology!

But you’re not anti-hammer, anti-tool, or anti-technology. You’re simply pointing out that hammers aren’t designed for turning screws.

The law of the hammer

There’s a famous quote that nicely summarizes this scenario:

If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.

This observation, from the psychologist Abraham Maslow, is commonly known as the “law of the hammer” (Maslow, 1966, p 15). It’s what happens when people become so enthralled by a new tool or innovative technology, they try to use it for anything and everything.

Then again, just because we can do something with technology doesn’t always mean we should. And understanding what we can do with technology vs. what we should do with technology gets to the essential difference between technology education and technology training:

• Technology training refers to learning how to use specific types of technologies, from simple tools (like hammers) to complex machines and media (such as computers and apps).
• Technology education means understanding how to use the right type of technology for the right kind of purpose. In other words, it means asking if the tech is suited to the task at hand.

Where do we get this distinction from? Enter Neil Postman.

Neil Postman on technology training vs. technology education

Perhaps nobody wrote about this difference better than educator and author Neil Postman. Like Marshall McLuhan, Postman became famous for his contributions to the holistic study of technology and media (a discipline he called “media ecology”). And one of his major contributions was explaining the distinction between technology training vs. technology education.

For instance, in his book The End of Education, Postman explains this difference by comparing technology to food. Here’s the main idea:

It makes no sense to be categorically against technology, just as it makes no sense to be against food. We need both to live. Nevertheless, it does make sense to ask if we’re overusing any one type of technology, just as it makes sense to ask if we’re overeating any single kind of food. Therefore, Postman argues, technology education is to technology as healthy nutrition is to food:

technology education does not imply a negative attitude toward technology. It does imply a critical attitude. To be “against technology” makes no more sense than to be “against food.” We can’t live without either. But to observe that it is dangerous to eat too much food, or to eat food that has no nutritional value, is not to be “antifood.” It is to suggest what may be the best uses of food (Postman, 1995, p 191).

From technology education to tech ethics

Postman’s argument remains relevant today. For example, a lot of learning nowadays includes technology training, and rightly so. But there’s not much technology education, at least in Postman’s sense. Now, why care about the latter? Isn’t it enough to know how to use our tools, machines, and media? Why bother thinking critically about how to best use them as well?

As Postman points out, understanding how to use the right type of technology for the right kind of purpose—that is, finding the tech best suited for the task—can help us use technology more intelligently, and even ethically, in our daily lives. To give Postman the last word in this regard:

Technology education aims at … learning about what technology helps us to do and what it hinders us from doing; it is about how technology uses us, for good or ill, and how it has used people in the past, for good or ill. It is about how technology creates new worlds, for good or ill (p 191-192).

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References

Maslow, Abraham. (1966). The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. New York: Harper & Row.

Postman, Neil. (1995). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.