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The fallout goes far beyond the workplace. Many people now doubt their ability to make their own decisions about what to feed their families, how to parent their children, or about the myriad of other choices made on a daily basis. In the process of relying on credentialed experts, we seem to have lost our intuition. (Watch for an article about this in Natural Life Magazine’s September/October issue.) We no longer are able to recognize, value, or trust the wisdom that we have gained – often incidentally – on our own. Instead, we consult those who make their living telling us how to run our lives, and those who have the most letters after their names are usually in highest demand and make the most money. The standardized people processing – and its glorification – that is part of our education system is, in some critics’ opinions (mine included), holding back our progress as a society. It also sometimes fosters dishonesty, ethical lapses, and even crime. There’s this cheating scandal by teachers and principals that was driven by the emphasis on test performance. Then there’s the proliferation of “diploma mills” that prey on those who think they need the letters after their names but aren’t willing or able to do the academic work. And, of course, even training, testing, grading, and credentialing don’t guarantee competence, as we’ve seen from a variety of high profile flameouts, such as this doctor whose poor decisions and misguided testimony put many innocent people in jail. Helping to counteract the expert mentality that is associated with credentialism has been one of the cornerstones of my work over the past thirty-five years, in my writing, publishing, speaking, and volunteering. I try to help people gain faith in their ability to get past the gatekeepers, to do things that our society has left to “experts,” – such as growing our own food, running a business, cooking a meal, taking care of our health, learning and helping our children to learn, entertaining ourselves, and so on. Changing this paradigm is like swimming upstream, but I think we’re slowly regaining our collective senses. And once we’ve taken back our lives, we can create more change by modeling it for others. As I wrote in my book Challenging Assumptions in Education, since studies show there is little correlation between education levels (and credentials) and job performance, there is no reason to judge people’s employability (or anything else for that matter, except their ability to write tests and hand in essays on time) by their degrees. So those of us who are in hiring positions can reconsider human resource policies that require (or pay more for) university or college degrees. We can look at a wide range of other qualifications, such as job and practical life experience, related skills, and level of maturity. To really change the cult-of-experts mentality, many of us will have to examine our own past formal education experiences. We need to separate our identities as people from our university degrees. That, of course, means letting go of our attachment to those letters after our names. (Full disclosure: that’s not a problem for me, since I don’t have any degrees!) We must also stop holding up for public ridicule those who protect themselves from the “experts” by leaving the school system before graduation, not bowing to pressure to collect more credentials for their own sake, or refusing to hide behind any credentials they have earned. When we can do all of this, we will be well on the way to creating a learning society. P.S. In addition to the aforementioned
book, I’ve written about credentialism in other places
such as here,
here, and here.
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Slaying the Credentialism Dragon –
July 8, 2011