I did a piece yesterday on Samizdata about the piece I did here about the training methods used by the British Army. And a comment has appeared there of just the sort I was hoping for, from "gearweasle", whoever he might be.

EDIP, Explain, Demonstrate, Imitate, Practice: another child of WWI 's Charles R. (Skipper) Allen's four step training method for training shipyard workers in the United States, and revamped in WWII by AT&T's Michael J. Kane (working for the US's Training Within Industry program).

Kane's revamped method was Allen's four step method expanded to seven steps:

1. Show workers how to do it.
2. Explain key points, tricks, knacks
3. Let them watch you do it again.
4. Let them do the simple parts of the job.
5. Help them do the whole job.
6. Let them do the whole job -- but watch them.
7. Put them on their own.

Anyway, the USA in 1940 had just realized it needed to begin production on a massive scale, and was going to have to train millions of people in war work, while losing millions of trained people to the armed services.

Training Within Industry, an advisory service formed by the National Defense Advisory Commission, developed eventually three training programs (JIT, Job Instructor Training; JM, Job Methods; and JR, Job Relations), which was well written about by Bird McCord in: Chapter 32: Job Instruction, in Training and Development Handbook 2nd Edition – a guide to human resource development, edited by Robert L. Craig, sponsored by the American Society for Training and Development, ISBN 0-07-013350-6.

The easy read of the "J" Programs is the 1943 Reader's Digest (US editions, sorry) series of three articles over the months of September, October, and November. Gives good feel for "how they did it", that is, how they trained the trainers to train the people who did the jobs, and how to train them how to look at the jobs.

And for a fascinating overview of what it meant to conceive and start up these gigantic coordinated industries – just for airpower – read General Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold's Global Mission. Wowser.

Postscript. Come to think of it, EDIP is only the JIT portion of the "J" Programs; they also worked on worker relations (Job Relations), and motion economy training (Job Methods).

Well, I don't know how many of us will be doing all that homework, but you do get a sense of the sheer power of the USA and its culture from that. I do, anyway. It may all sound rather impersonal ("human resource" development, etc.), but it's all part of the American dream. If they treat you as a human resource, they are at least treating you as human, which for a lot of people then was a big step in the right direction.

There has been argument here already about whether mere "training" has anything very much to do with the profundities that constitute "education". I say that training has a lot to do with education.

Think about how much is got across in the "training" that the gearweasle man describes. I don't think these guys (and girls) only learned how to fly (or build) an airplane, or to wire up a telephone exchange. I think they learned a whole attitude, a whole new confidence in their own power to get things done, things in general.

Okay, it all sounds a bit Big Businessy, in a bad way (in bed with the Government) as well as a good way (big because so well organised). But these guys were the people who took the USA from the Great Depression, through World War 2, to the deadlock in the Cold War that the next generation was able to turn into another huge win. And now we are witnessing this latest Iraq operation, which, whatever you think of its wisdom or moral justification, has been a miracle of coordinated human skill and savvy such as the world seldom witnesses.