Training – Teaching – Education
If you translate the German phrase “Erziehung von Hunden” (education of dogs) using the translation software of a major search engine, you get “training of dogs.”
There doesn’t seem to be any such thing as “education” in connection with dogs—and not just in English. There’s no such thing as “teaching” either.
Dogs are trained—and that’s what dog trainers are for in dog schools, even though dogs aren’t taught at all.
But the essential point—and not just with dogs—is education as imparting knowledge about the world through shared action.
In training, on the other hand, I teach the dog certain behaviors and/or tricks that it should perform when given a certain command.
Teaching isn’t necessary with dogs because they lack the desire to discuss our problems with us or to let us explain the world to them. A good example of the importance of education can be found in experiments on the acquisition of language and communication skills in chimpanzees. The classic, behaviorist approach is to train chimpanzees from as early a stage as possible. Just as has been attempted, and unfortunately still is, with autistic children. But communication skills are learned through active communication and interaction, as Kellogg’s experiments have shown.
” Kellogg offered the symmetrical possibility of raising a non-human primate in a human environment with his human son Donald. … Thus, a co-rearing study would test this hypothesis by placing a baby chimpanzee in a human home and to be treated as a human to determine if the chimpanzee could acquire human modes of responding. … Chimpanzee Gua developed human modes of responding far beyond Kellogg’s expectation. With respect to language comprehension, “the ape was considerably superior to the child in responding to human words” (Kellogg, 2002: 1). ” (Mintz Fields, W.; Segerdahl, P.; Savage-Rumbaugh, S. in: Valsiner, J.; Rosa, A. 2007)