Got Paper?
I know a great many things. Some of them I learned from experience, some from books, some from experimentation, some from inductive, and some from deductive reasoning. Some of it I learned in school. Compared to all the other parts, considering what I know and don't know, how I see the shape of the world and my place in it, most of what I know, I learned on my own. Some people (people other than me) learned a great lot of what they know or at least a lot of what they use in their research and their work (or at least on their resumes to get jobs) from school. They have PhDs and MFAs and MDs and DVMs and post-docs. The knowledge that they have is certified. They have credentials.
Both kinds of knowledge are important. Both kinds are essential, in fact. And really, all of us have some combination of both, school and not-school learning, at our disposal.
The difficulty for me comes when we use credentials to divide who gets to participate, who gets to have a voice at the table and how we form our world view. It comes when we use old pieces of paper to decide who can be interviewed for jobs. When we look not at what people say and the evidence they bring to the discussion, but on whether they have initials after their name.
And it is a difficult issue in our current world of too much information. When knowledge filtering is essential, it's nice to have quick and easy ways to decide who to listen to and who to ignore.
Sometimes it's easy to tell right and wrong. Using pieces of paper exclusive of experience and capability is wrong. Say it with me--it's wrong, wrong, wrong. I have no objection to someone who says--someone with a Computer Science degree and one year's experience could do this programming job; someone without a Computer Science degree and three year's experience actually doing programming could also do this job. I do object, strongly, to someone who says, we won't interview anyone for this position who doesn't have a Computer Science degree.
It's wrong. It's not only wrong, it's stupid. If you only hire people with Computer Science degrees, then you get a narrower range of viewpoints, of problem-solving skills, of ways of thinking.
That's a simple issue, easy to fix and why people insist on doing it wrong boggles me. But there are other, much more complicated issues that don't resolve so easily.
We have to keep an open mind. We have to keep remembering that there are many ways of learning and many ways of knowing and we need them all. We have to continue to look at the structures we have, the futures we are capable of, and the ways we interact with each other. The world is not one thing or the other. It's a world of possibilities, of continuous recreation, and it's a place where all kinds of knowledge, all kinds of experiences, all kinds of credentials--those that do and do not involve paper--need to be welcomed and considered.