What characterises the language of any profession, with its technicalities, its formalities, its habits and fashions, is that it functions at a distance from the common educated language spoken and written all around it. It is often now held to be a good thing, something to confer status that one is able to manipulate a special language and to live with skill inside a highly specialised working environment.
There are, it is true, some kinds of human activity which are by their nature (for good or for ill or for something in between) so remote from ordinary human living that they demand a good deal of language of a kind not generally in use, as shortcuts for describing out-of-the-ordinary situations.
When I first went to university, my tutor, who was of the old school, said to me firmly that I would very rarely need to use a word or an expression not easily understood by any educated person.
I set down here, then, in a few short paragraphs some outlines for the topic I want to discuss.
I take it as axiomatic that a human being is not fully or satisfactorily to be defined in terms of what he or she does for a living. Even the most dedicated professional worker will spend most of his or her life not working at the tasks for which he or she is paid (I include, of course, sleeping time as being fully part of a life lived). Who would be able to say with confidence of the times spent not in the office or the laboratory, the lecture room or the hospital ward that they were insignificant parts of a life? I determine to become the best javelin thrower in the world, and I conceive this desire early in life, perhaps just out of my own inner self, or perhaps because someone I admire or envy has shown me what a thing it is to be able to throw the javelin well. It is not (yet) the case in our culture that the obvious thing for me to do, at the age of 8, will be to go to javelin-school, at which uses of the right arm not insistently to do with the launching of a long stick are pretty much entirely neglected. Most people (still) would find that idea absurd. What, however, they would not find nearly so absurd is the suggestion that young people, let us say at about 18 years old when the ways in which one might use human language and human thinking are still developing (particularly if they have suffered what passes for education at most schools, even, or particularly, the expensive crammers), should abandon that general development in favour of exclusive specialisation in courses of management or accountancy.
The old way of thought about education was that first you made your understanding and then you undertook whatever more specialised training might be necessary to fit you for particular tasks. Or it might be, if those specialised tasks lay very near the common centre of a life lived in your own society, that the making of an understanding could go hand in hand, for instance, with learning how to make a boat. At any rate, the thing of prime importance, both for the individual concerned and for the society in which he or she lived, was the quality of a whole life. It used to be thought that the more highly specialised the training required for any particular occupation, the more necessary it was for education to 'aim off', not to be trapped in a human narrowness.
We live now in a culture of 'expertise', with any common centre very undervalued, and with sniffy distinction made in almost any department of life between the 'amateur' and the 'professional'. Professionals are always preferred (except, oddly, in the case of the oldest profession, where amateurs are regarded as more desirable, indeed better at the job). But I would like to urge the older view. I wonder with what kind of confidence one could really approach a professional in his field who knew almost nothing about anything else. He or she might be incredibly quick and comprehensive in a knowledge of the field, extraordinarily up-to-date and well informed, might know everything there was to know about the vessel being sailed in; just the person to go down with it when it sank, for want of any ability to conceive that it might not be watertight.
Look, says a really educated person, whose mind has been formed by a proper education nothing whatever to do with 'management' or 'finance', who has come to city or bank work after thinking a lot about other things, ships have sunk in the past, the confidence of sailors notwithstanding. I could tell you about some of them, he says,
"I could tell you because before I began to be a banker, I read Greats at Oxford, in the course of which reading I came across many instances of ships going down, both metaphorically and literally. There are people in my office with nothing but degrees and further degrees and higher degrees in Management or Accountancy who know nothing of ships not being seaworthy, or indeed of metaphor. Their grasp of the shadowy, quasi-fictional world of high finance is breathtaking; but it is not sufficient because it doesn't envisage a world before there was high finance or a world after it. Even their understanding of their special area of skill is intrinsically deeply inadequate for that reason; let alone their understanding of why on earth they might in the first place be doing what it is they do".
Let us have education first; and then afterwards we can have training if we will.