TRAINING is the watchword of the 1990s. You cannot, it seems, even open a door in a restaurant or wash somebody's hair without some kind of training in ''door-opening skills'' or ''hair-washing techniques''. And training always involves a bit of paper at the end advertising your achievements. But however many bits of paper stating ''Highly Commended for Hair Washing'' or ''Door Opener of the Year 1999'' the quality of service in this country remains abysmal.

This does not, of course, apply to all service providers in the UK. But people who have grasped the actual deal of service, rather than just reading the word in a book, are few and far between. In the majority of hairdressing salons, for example, sullen girls with more qualifications than a Fellow of All Souls seem to feel that they are providing a good service when they slouch at two miles an hour over to the basin into which you have been pinned by the neck, 10 minutes after the appointment time you were given. Their ''service'' comprises, once they have heroically completed their apparently exhausting journey, asking in voices reeking of boredom: ''Is the temperature okay?'' The answer is of little interest. Like the functions they perform, the questions they ask are automatic. These girls (usually) have learnt their trade much as you might learn to play the piano in theory only, ie with

adequate technical knowledge, but absolutely no feeling for what the whole performance is really about.

Training is, in essence, a good thing I suppose. After all, you cannot be a waiter if you cannot stack plates; you cannot be a nurse if you cannot wind a bandage; and you cannot be a hairdresser if you cannot wield the scissors. I was trained in the art of clipping a horse, but when I tried to clip the dog the other day, the results were so disastrous I had to pretend in the park that he was not mine. Training is clearly very useful.

But training nowadays is believed to be the end of the matter and this is where it falls down. For training is, in reality, just the beginning. Learning the moves in chess is a necessary but not a sufficient prerequisite for someone claiming to be a chess player. An ability to extract blood is vital, but it does not make you into a nurse. A certificate declaring you to be a Gold Medal Dog Walker is no more an indicator of complete, all-round excellence in dog-walking than writing a cook book means you are a proficient cook. These skills are simply an indicator of technical know-how. What makes good your claim to be a nurse, a hairdresser, a chess player or a cook is the spontaneous feeling that rises up from deep within you, which enables you to feel for and respond to the person whose blood you are extracting, whose hair you are washing, whose knight you are taking or whose dinner you are

creating. It is this quality that transforms technique into service.

Michael Oakeshott in his 1947 essay Rationalism in Politics calls this transforming attribute ''practical knowledge''. He argues that ''nowhere, not even in political activity, can technical knowledge be separated from practical knowledge and nowhere can they be considered identical with one another or able to take the place of one another''. Yet this is precisely what is happening now. The Government places great emphasis on technical training, whose supposed ''benefits'' it can measure by the increased sales of certificate frames, but forgets about practical knowledge, which is an equally important part.

But how on earth can you train people to have a feeling for what they do, to perform more than superficial obeisance to the service they are supposedly providing? The answer is clearly not to provide still more training and dole out of still more certificates. If more training was the answer there would be, for example, no bad teachers, for the amount of

''in-service training days'' which litter the school year are the despair of many working parents.

Perhaps we might learn something from old traditions. After young sheep dogs have been taught basic obedience, sometimes they are coupled with an older one to put flesh on to the bones of their training. The young dog then sees not just what the whistle means, but what the whole picture is about. He learns to assess the sheep, to know just when to be still and when to move. Even if a sheepdog could read, this is knowledge he could not acquire from a book, or, indeed, from the shepherd. A good sheepdog is made by his ability patiently and intelligently to absorb the whole essence of his job through observation. There is a lesson here somewhere.

It would be unfair, I suppose, to make trainee door-openers or hairdressers watch endless repeats of One Man And His Dog or read Michael Oakeshott, but the benefits of us all would be immense. After all, it is the sheepdogs rather than Pavlov's dogs who really deserve those certificates.