The tyranny of credentialism: We have increasingly become a society of credential-seekers, in which people are judged, not on the quality of their offerings, but by their credentials. Our scholars learn to think in terms of winning the approval of the credentialed, and especially the approval of those who confer credentials, rather than thinking independently. The result is a kind of political correctness within each credentialing in which independent thought is suppressed. Even if it is supported by a minority of the credentialed, the high priests of credentialing will exert their authority over the process and discourage the spread of heretical learning as unschooled or unlettered. However, it didnt used to be that way: From THE BOOK OF LISTS (by Wallechinsky, Wallace, & Wallace): 15 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER GRADUATED FROM GRADE SCHOOL: Andrew Carnegie, Charlie Chaplin, Buffalo Bill Cody, Noel Coward, Charles Dickens, Isadora Duncan, Thomas Edison, Samuel Gompers, Maksim Gorky, Claude Monet, Sean O’Casey, Alfred E. Smith, John Philip Sousa, Henry M. Stanley, Mark Twain. 20 FAMOUS HIGH-SCHOOL OR SECONDARY-SCHOOL DROPOUTS: Harry Belafonte, Cher, Mary Baker Eddy, Henry Ford, George Gershwin, D. W. Griffith, Adolf Hitler, Jack London, Dean Martin, Bill Mauldin, Rod McKuen, Steve McQueen, Amedeo Modigliani, Al Pacino, Will Rogers, William Saroyan, Frank Sinatra, Marshal Tito, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright. 20 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER ATTENDED COLLEGE: Joseph Chamberlain, Grover Cleveland, Joseph Conrad, Aaron Copland, Hart Crane, Eugene Debs, Amelia Earhart, Paul Gauguin, Kahlil Gibran, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Abraham Lincoln, H. L. Mencken, John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harry S. Truman, George Washington, Virginia Woolf. 13 FAMOUS AMERICAN LAWYERS WHO NEVER WENT TO LAW SCHOOL: Patrick Henry, John Jay*, John Marshall*, William Wirt, Roger B. Taney*, Daniel Webster, Salmon P. Chase*, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Clarence Darrow (attended one year), Robert Storey, J. Strom Thurmond, James 0. Eastland. * - Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. This is not to say that credentials are irrelevant, but only that they are not all they are made up to be. This is nowhere more important than in economics, because economics is closely tied to the distribution of wealth and the justification of privilege.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 14:38:18 +0000