I agree that credentials do cut through the HUGE NUMBERS. But, gosh, sometimes the credential acts to cloak the activities of the person and so the client is so mystified that he/she can't or won't ask questions---even when things go wrong.
Of course a great credential can be a fine sheepskin for a wolf (or just an incompetent...) to hide under.
But I was talking about a necssary, not a sufficient condition for the coordination of a highly-skill differentiated mass of persons.
Transparency surely is a good thing to continually strive for, but, as Louis Kahn said:
All the things that are are light that has been spent.
And the light casts a shadow,
And the shadow belongs to the light.Or, as I like to paraphrase Erving Goffman:
Where thre's a system, there's a way to work it.
We see objects only because they are opaque. Transparency of the ambient atmosphere is necessary to see anything, but every thing provides an oppoortunity to hide behind.
There are no easy solutions, but I do think that increase of population (beyond some "golden mean", probably the size of classical Athens, ca. 20,000 souls...) is an independent variable that monotonically increases the level of difficulty.
Yes, I know, the solution to all our (and esp. the Japanese since their females are being even more selfish than ours in not producing enough children!) problems is to increase the number of young workers (forever!), i.e., as the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company slogan goes:
Cover the earth
\brad mccormick
No easy solution to this issue. But making more open the workings of the medical, legal, chiropractic, architecural, etc. licensing and governance bodies is a good first step.
arthur
-----Original Message----- From: Brad McCormick, Ed.D. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 14, 2003 8:44 AM To: Cordell, Arthur: ECOM Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Harry,
Go back an re-read Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. He makes a strong case for getting rid of a lot of the accreditation in society saying that it just builds enclaves of monopoly power. ie., privilege.
[snip]
It seems to me that the justification for accreditation lies in the HUGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE, which prevents persons from verifying the competencies of the persons they need services from by first-person experience of performative evidence.
Our doctors, et al., apart from their cdredentials, are mostly "pig in a poke"s to us. I don't see how this can be changed in the anonymo-city.
However, perhaps the credentialling process can be shifted from multiple choice tests to the making and predsentation of masterpieces. This happens to some extent (e.g., for watchmaker trainees). But I think the tendency is away from personal presentation of evidence of mastery toward enhancing Educational Testing Service's services.
Anoher problem is that even where supposedly evidence of mastery is the criterion, as in the PhD dissertation process, much of the time the "evidence" prouced is something that means nothing to the learner but which is of some use as cheap labor to those who already have their credential. I think we need to acknowledge that many graduate students do not yet have any really meaningful interests in their young lives, and we need to find a way to let them do the jobs they are training for without jumping thru hoops.
For the mindful god abhors untimely growth. (--Holderlin)
Dissertations should be optional productions, which come when "the spirit moves" a person to have something to say in an honorific sense.
Besides making the creenialling process more genuinely reasonable as part of meaningful personal and social life, I think we also ned to tr to minimize the situations which require credentialling. Automobile driving licenses are an obvious example here: The whole instituional establishment of driver licensing only exists because persons cannot walk to the places they need and want to go to in their daily lives. We need to design out of life such regimentation-creating social structures. -- unless, of course, we genuinely enjoy being tested and geting credentialled and failing to get credentialled.... "Daddy, when can I take the SATs? I wanna! I really wanna! When, daddy, PLEASE!" "Sorry son, but you have to go to kindergarten first. You have to learn to be patient. You'll get your chance to do the fun things grownups do when you are old enough. You just have to have some patience...."
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
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