Zoriana at Toastmasters. Credentialism – impromptu speech. Russian wreckage.

20221106

Eddie could not come to ArtTalkers yesterday.  His mother thought he was sick. Zoriana relished the opportunity to come by herself. She took the photographs of the meeting. She also followed mommy's orders and didn't watch any video. That was easy because none were offered, at least that I noticed.

I served as ToastMaster. We had a loose agenda so I gave the speech I had just drafted on credentialism. What you see below would run about 14 minutes. I cut it down to seven, the allotted time for a speech. It went over fairly well.

Andrei gave a speech about germ phobia, which I loved.  Natalia’s was entitled “A Modern Woman.”  It was a very predictable catalog of the advances women have made over the last few decades.  I wryly commented that at our upcoming meeting on exes I will deliver a speech about two modern women.  My ex-wives.

Zoriana impressed me by writing a bunch of stuff which you see in the photograph here. I knew she could make the letters, but not that she could make words.

Coming home we have an hour to kill. We rode up the funicular instead of taking the Metro. That took us down the main street, Volodymyrska, where we first encountered a man playing piano.  He is there every weekend, a very good player, sitting there in the open air.  He and Zoriana had a pleasant conversation.

Zoriana had not had to use the bathroom five minutes earlier as we left the restaurant, but all of a sudden she had a pressing need.  We scrambled all over to find the public toilet.

We then saw these tanks from the war. That was something new.  Tanks need no introduction.  I think the other thing is a multiple rocket launcher.

From there walked the along Volodymyrska to the station at Prorizna, two blocks from where Oksana and I lived when we were first married and Eddie was born.  We took the Metro home and met Vadim who was returning the projector screen he had borrowed for a speech contest last weekend.

That’s the news from lake WeBeGone, where the kids are playing “Hop on Pop” every night in the darkness as the good-looking woman beams an “all’s right in the world” sort of smile.

Graham

The rise and fall of credentialism

Two centuries ago a person could go through life doing what they did without much in the way of credentials. There have always been some. In the Middle Ages there were guilds that would attest to the skill of a craftsman doing his work. This was useful. Craftsman moved from town to town from employer to employer, and the fact that they belong to a guild someplace meant that one group of professionals thought that they were skilled enough to practice.

There are similar groups of credentialed people in the intellectual sphere. Universities have long awarded degrees that bachelors and Masters that attest to a certain level of learning the value of the credential depends on the credibility that's the root word credence - credibility – of the institution awarding doctors and lawyers have long belong to rational societies in which they recognized one another's competence.

However, in general society was simple enough that people could recognize competence when they saw it. Personal reputation was enough.   With the Industrial Revolution we became significantly more mobile and more numerous. A teacher might be trained in one city and move to another.

My grandfather moved from Michigan and brought his credentials with him.  The medical board recognized the credential and he was admitted to practice medicine in California. Written credentials make a person's qualifications somewhat objective.

Without credentials an employer has to rely on an interview. Those can be quite inaccurate. In other cases they can offer demonstrations of work. This is easier in some professions than others. A carpenter or programmer can show a piece of furniture or an algorithm as evidence of ability. A teacher or doctor cannot.

Those are the positive benefits of a systems of credentials. There are less desirable features. One of them is restraint of trade.  Requiring that doctors and lawyers be certified by boards restricts competition and raise fees.

Credentialing works towards restraint of trade in the skilled crafts as well. There are closed shops, in which every employee must be a member of the union. One of these trades was newspaper typesetting. My first job with IBM in the 1960s had me bring in computer typesetting to replace highly paid Linotype operators, significantly cutting payroll at the three San Francisco area newspapers .

My diploma from the University of California at Berkeley is still a sterling credential. It is not quite as prestigious as a diploma from Harvard or Stanford, but it is not bad. 

For several decades, universities have been graduating more people than the job market can absorb. The world needs only so many journalism majors, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists. This gives power to the institutions that award credentials. Private universities have been able to raise tuition because people feel that they need the most impressive possible credential. Moreover, they can afford an overpriced education because of government backed student loans. Four years of goofing off, followed by a lifetime of debt.

That’s how credentialism rose. Now comes the fall

Credentials have been assumed to be awarded based on ability. Ability is unequally distributed across human populations. The Jews, Northeast Asians Japanese Chinese and Koreans tend to be at the top of every field that requires brainpower. Next in line fall us of European descent, with a minor gradient from north to south, and then the other peoples of the world South Asians, Latin Americans, and African.

It has been observed that the members of the groups I name acquire the most credentials. There is, however, a strong current of thought running through today's society that all peoples are of equal ability. It is at the heart of the Diversity Equity Inclusion mantra.  It concludes that any imbalance between the percentages of credential holders and a group’s representation in society must be the result of discrimination.

Attempting to remedy supposedly unjust distribution, there have been affirmative action and diversity programs in place for half a century.  The result has been that minorities have been admitted to universities for which they were not otherwise qualified.  They have been given job opportunities, such as piloting boats and airplanes, for which they are not otherwise qualified and for which they would not qualify were they not of a favored ethnicity. This is becoming increasingly evident.

Standardized admissions tests such as the College Board showed without a doubt that Jews and Asians were more academically capable than other groups. Admissions officers didn’t want to see it. They have abandoned use of the tests.  They therefore admit students who cannot do the work. As night follows day, admitting students incapable of doing assigned work poses the same dilemma again.  Should professors honestly grade the students and let the record show that they are not up to the work, or give them passing marks anyway? Very often it is the latter, the truth being professional poison. 

Universities are increasingly politicized. Professors routinely award grades based on a student’s political convictions rather than academic excellence.  Succinctly put, a conservative white student will find it difficult to get his talent recognized.

Employers realize that today’s credentials, driven by concerns of political correctness, no longer testify to actual talent. It once was otherwise. The black officers with whom I worked in Vietnam had passed the same officer efficiency rating tests as everybody else. You could take the insignia on their shoulders at face value. The professor who handed me my Phi Beta Kappa key in 1966 was black.  I would not have thought to doubt he had earned the right to do so.  Today I would expect just the opposite. 

What are employers doing? In every intellectual domain, they ask candidates for samples of work. If you are a writer, send us articles and books. If you are a programmer, send some things you programmed. If you are an architect, show us plans and buildings.  Without a doubt this is the way it should be done in the first place. The Internet makes all of this much easier.

The Internet has its limitations.  As above, one cannot accurately evaluate schoolteachers or doctors by the outcomes of their students or patients. The results play out over a long period of time, and there is no way to take into account the average ability of the students being taught or the state of the disease being cured. In these disciplines peer ratings are probably the best measure of ability.   

A potential employer can sometimes access Internet sites to determine how many followers or subscribers a candidate has. He can infer something about the candidate from the quality and quantity of comments on those boards.  An employer can also judge by the reputation of those who offer a positive opinions about the candidate. At any rate the Internet, by allowing the exchange of work products and the ability to scan others’ opinions has largely supplanted credentialism.

Many professional positions in today’s society are simply not needed. This includes diversity officers, drug counselors, school advisors, second language experts, psychologists and a raft of others whose job in life is to paper over the fact that some people will simply never have the combination of grit and intelligence to succeed in life.  Rich societies find it easier to throw money at problems than to acknowledge uncomfortable truths. Ukraine, where I live, cannot afford and does not have many such people.  Their absence is absolutely not felt.

The credentialed experts have been a disaster in the time of Covid.  Their pronunciamientos with regard to social distancing, “two weeks to stop the spread,” masks, stops transmission, keeps you from getting Covid, “safe and effective” and everything else were absolutely wrong.  This included almost all mainstream journalists, doctors working for big hospitals and health organizations, and government officials.  Especially egregious were their campaigns to strip people who disagreed with them (whom history has shown were right) of their credentials.

This is also true with regard to climate science.  Honest science reveals that (1) climate is not changing dramatically, and the rate of change has been quite constant since before the Industrial Age, (2) CO2 is almost totally unrelated to climate change, and (3) taking all factors into account, “green” solutions are about as polluting at fossil fuels.  If you buy the argument that CO2 is a pollutant. If you count the pollution caused by extracting those exotic metals for “green” solutions, fossil is cleaner. All in all, credentialism is a failed religion.

Assessing other people is a community function. We can anticipate that with the coming economic collapse, and the collapse of globalism in general making people more local, that local, community-based validation of ability rather than credentials will become more widespread.  The corrupt systems of credentialism will lose favor as people learn to evaluate candidates on the strength of more reliable indicators.

I’m teaching my son Eddie how to do things, not just to shoot for a credential saying he can. Ukraine, fortunately, has not suffered much from credential inflation.  We can decide later whether a university education here will be worth the cost and time.

He will need key skills: reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.  Also reasoning, and specialized knowledge in some chosen domain.  These criteria should apply to every student.  The world into which our children grow to adulthood will need people who can get things done.  My hope is that it will revert to common-sense mechanisms of determining ability, and that rampant credentialism will become a thing of the past.