Here are three separate stories which are connected by a common theme: The damage done by our American idea of higher education and meritocracy is largely unaddressed.
Story #1: Assigned to write a biographical sketch of a historical figure, my son wandered through the library at Sidwell Friends School and discovered a brief biography of Benjamin Franklin by D.H. Lawrence--yes, that D.H. Lawrence--which he plucked up because it was a very thin book but he quickly became captivated by its breezy British wit, its withering criticism of a beloved American hero and he wrote a paper echoing this whole approach. His teacher, who held a degree from the Columbia University school of education was outraged and gave him a C minus. He was devastated. Now, years later, a graduate of Columbia himself (College of Physicians and Surgeons) he says that taught him a valuable lesson--no matter how inspired or captivated you may be by what you are working on as a student, you must not be distracted from the real goal, which is to jump through hoops and focus on doing and say what you need to in order to get the grade from the person grading you. He says all successful students he has known have internalized this concept.
Story # 2. When I ran an inner city clinic in Washington, DC, many of my patients were African Americans from Georgia and the Carolinas. They were just about mute, impenetrable and when I finally did get answers out of them, they struck me as being not very bright. On the other hand, the patients from Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, who comprised about a third of the clinic, were very bright, very articulate, responsive, engaging. I tried to imagine why African Americans seemed so much dumber than actual Africans. I realized, I might be misreading the African Americans, who were, after all, facing a white doctor in a white coat, and likely had learned playing dumb is the best strategy for dealing with authorities, especially white authorities. But that explanation didn't really feel accurate. I finally decided the difference was the Africans, who were educated by other Africans, in a system set up by colonial powers, had simply never been taught they were stupid, and they had learned to ask questions, to be optimistic about their own capacity for learning.
3. Talking with a local friend, here in New Hampshire, about her grandfather, who was mentioned in a book I had been reading about the rescue of the Squalmus, a submarine which sank off the coast of New Hampshire, I told her about the part her grandfather had played as a tugboat captain, and how he had reacted in an emergency with a daring, ingenious and ultimately successful way to prevent the submarine he was towing from sinking in the Piscataqua River and being lost forever. The intelligence, the understanding of currents, vectors, pressures, speed, the calculations he made were very impressive. "Well," my friend said, "He never went to college, of course. Today, he couldn't be a captain because of that. You have to go to college now."
"And who at any college could have taught him anything which would have helped him that day?" I asked.
"No one," she shrugged. "That's just the way it is now."
So my friend has accepted what my son has accepted--our industry, our education system has been corrupted and this corruption has been accepted and institutionalized. Part of this has occurred for money reasons. There is a huge industry in certification. A new technology appears, say reading a bone density, which is actually read by a computer and signed by a doctor: Instantly there is a company or organization offering a "certification" in that technology and the insurance industry accepts this and refuses to pay anyone "reading" a bone density who does not have that certification. The certifying process has little or nothing to do with verifying the holder of the certificate is actually competent and everything to do with money.
Which is not to say all certification is corrupt. There are certifications for welders of airplane engines which are quite rigorous and pristine; certifications of airplane pilots on new airplanes are well done. But in the industry with which I'm most familiar, medicine, everything from licensure exams to board certification exams to procedure certificates are thoroughly corrupt in the sense they claim to separate competence from incompetence and they do nothing of the kind.
Even the welders, who must pass certifications on their welds (which include X ray examination of their work )are beset by the college requirement, if they wish to advance to management. You can work at a GE airplane engine plant for 20 years, master all the technology, organize your team effectively, but at some point, you get hauled aside and told you cannot advance to managerial level because you do not have a college degree, any college degree will do.
Conservatives rail at the stupidity of government for instituting policies which enforce idiocy--their experience in the Army engendered this attitude in some cases. But the government cannot hold a candle to American industry and commerce for this sort of behavior.
In New Hampshire, where many factories are small, three hundred people or less, this sort of imbecility is often absent. The tool and dye maker advances through his company because the people who run it know him and they know what he can do--they would never rely on some ill conceived requirement or test, because their survival depends on the competence of their own workers.
Maybe there's a lesson in all this. But I don't have the college degree to be able to draw any conclusions.
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