[game_edu] Training vs. Education (was Industry luminaries..)

[Scott Nicholson]

I'm a professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, and my area is library science.  We prepare students to go out and work as librarians, and this type of argument about the failure of programs to prepare students for their first job comes up again and again.

Some people the the profession want us to be a center for training.  Every few years, someone will beat the drum, saying that "library schools are teaching all of this theory, and we get the students and have to train them."

We see our role as educators, so we do teach them theory, and then they apply it through assignments and internships.  But the reality is that each workplace is different, so there is no way we could train a student to be ready to work on day one in any library or information position.  

It sounds like the same frustration is happening here - people in the industry want someone who, on day one, is ready to be dropped into a position and be fully functional in that particular job setting, and that's just not feasible.  These folks want training for a specific job (and I can sympathize with that, but it's not what we do in higher education).

We are preparing students for a lifetime career, and not for a specific job.  The concepts and theories will be a framework to support the individual as they move from place to place.  If all we did was focus on preparing people for a specific job, then they would struggle to move out of that job.  We are not focused on preparing people for just their first job.

What has happened in the library space is that the professional organization now has an accrediting procedure, so schools that wish to be accredited have to teach certain things and involve the profession in certain ways.  Most library positions require a degree from a school that has gotten this accreditation, so that is how engagement with accreditation is enforced.