General and Specialized Education Programs

Education and training have often been thought of as naturally falling into one of two categories: general or specialized. General education includes the study of a range of topics, and its emphasis tends to be on promoting a wide span of knowledge or encouraging habits of thought or behavior. A general education is usually obtained in a college or university. Specialized education focuses on specific tasks that are appropriate for accomplishing a particular career. A specialized education is generally found at a vocational or trade school that offers courses for a particular career, such as cosmetology, finish carpentry, or medical assisting. Each of these two types of education has a variety of advantages and disadvantages, with much of the preference between the two depending on a student's goals and talents.

Specialized education is typically more geared toward the specific tasks a person must perform in a chosen target career. Training that goes along with the specialized education offers focused, intensive instruction that is most often delivered by experienced professionals who work in the target career. This training provides real-world examples and directly prepares students for the job they will be doing. Specialized training can often lead directly to internships or job placement. While it is often more closely associated with blue-collar trades and technical labor, the term specialized education can also be applied to the professional preparation of engineers and accountants. Even doctors and lawyers undergo specialized education.

General education often provides students with valuable “soft skills,” such as critical thinking, effective communication, or conceptual frameworks. By contrast, specialized education or training instructs students in how to perform specific tasks or the individual steps in a certain process. As a result of these differences, general education can take much longer to achieve because its goals are more open ended and its steps less strictly defined. Specialized training can often be accomplished in a much shorter time frame depending on the level of expertise required for a person to begin work in the specific field. Specialized training is often accompanied with on-the-job training or with continuing education to keep students informed of new developments in their field.

Likewise, the idea of specialized education dates back hundreds of years to when one person would teach his or her trade to another. In the preindustrial era (before the mid-1700s), skilled craftsmen trained the next generation through apprenticeship programs. Innovators in colonial America established laws about the type of training apprentices had to receive from master craftsmen. Using federal land grants, trade schools were established in the years after the American Civil War (1861–65) as the country shifted from a society based on farming to one that needed industrialized labor. In the early decades of the twentieth century, trade schools gave way to vocational and technical schools governed by vocational boards with specific training and licensing requirements.

General and specialized educational approaches have a certain amount of overlap. When deciding which path may be right for you, consider the skill sets required and the goals met by each type. On the one hand, general education involves a longer and less direct path to knowledge and so demands a more patient disposition and intellectual skills better suited to conceptual learning, abstract thinking, critical analysis, and overall theoretical application of broad principles. Specialized education, on the other hand, suits a more practical, hands-on approach, where new skills can be put to use immediately and any new abstract knowledge can be clearly applied to specific tasks.