Training versus Education
keith418 points to the distinction between training and education. He has at the ready here Nock and Leo Strauss, and likely many more names, words, and hours of thought and study besides. I have only my lived experience and my habit of attempting to draw meanings from words themselves to bring to bear on this topic. Worse, I write this as I think it, not after much consideration.

The distinction is regardless critical and plain to see. I am well-trained; I am also decent at training myself. And after plowing through a large amount of material and even applying it here and there, I can tell, at the end of the day, that this is simply training.

Training, as I think of it, is something you put on, like a shirt or a pair of pants. Vocational training is something you wear along with your profession's uniform. It will in time become as familiar and worn as that uniform; you will also experience some discomfort as you break it in.

Just as you dress yourself in the morning and disrobe at night, so training can be put on and put off again. It is itself superficial. This is not to say that putting on the same ideas, thoughts, and approaches day upon day will not shape something more fundamental, but this shaping is accidental. The substance of training is to provide you with the necessary equipment to accomplish some task.

Education, on the other hand, is not a putting on, but a process of nurturing the heart and drawing out what lay hidden there. It is making explicit and submitting to question what was before inherent and unquestioned.

Education is long, hard, and requires significant effort. Training can require great effort as well; it is not by effort alone that these are distinguished. If you think a while, you will likely find that you know the difference already. The two feel different, as they differ in kind.

Training is fast and rushed. You seek to throw as much in your toolkit as possible as quickly as possible.

Education is by necessity slower: it is slower not only to bear results, but slower because it requires pausing in the stream of thoughts and circling and recircling the same issue. Education happens when something yields up a kernel of truth; when a question resolves itself, rewarding you with a previously undiscovered insight, and generates yet more questions.

There is also a difference in direction: training is primarily, in both its effort and ornament, an external process; education, while relying on external stimuli, also relies on internalizing, transmuting, and re-envisioning those external stimuli.

Ultimately, training amounts to consumption and appropriation: education, to production and generation.

I am thinking about this tonight because I am frustrated by how easy it is for me to train myself, how readily and rapidly I assimilate new facts, and how bad I am at producing anything of value. Like a dog, I perform tricks for treats, but there is nothing there but flash, and when no-one demands anything, there is nothing.