THEORY AND PRACTICE: AN OUTWORN DICHOTOMY OR THE PERENNIAL CHALLENGE FOR PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION - Essay Example

Finally, all these changes have affected and put under challenge professional education. This is further evident in the following lines as mentioned by Robert B. Reich, when he says, “In this mercantilist game, one sovereign’s advance (was) necessarily at the expense of another, because the whole point of the exercise (was) to gain more power than a potential opponent.” (Reich, 1991, p.14). The above statement by Reich has served to raise the bar as far as professional performance at the very grass roots level is concerned.

Competitive advantage is the new name of the game. This has in turn given rise to new diktats in the professional sphere. Professions in general have been subject to new conditions. The new conditions have raised issues about the nature of professional knowledge and particularly about the relationship between theory and practice. Usually people in the beginning of their professional career try to put into practice all the ‘theory’ they got in tertiary education and sometimes use it as their Bible.

After the first period of adaptation in the professional ring, they realize that, this effort towards applying theory to practice is not very helpful and that there is a strong need of a different knowledge field, which is more practical. Hence, the experience of practice leads them to be critical of the theoretical knowledge that they have acquired and often they replace it with practical knowledge acquired in the workplace. This practical knowledge is what we term as experience. So, the key issue for the practitioner of professional teaching is to create the necessary grounds for distinction between theory and practice in an up to date manner and thereby defining the two concepts as different.

This is thus a perennial challenge more than just an otworn dichotomy. The basis of education comes from its ability to imbibe enough effort into theory to translate the same into