This month’s Utne Reader has an article featuring yours truly; the subtitle includes a term that I used, somewhat spontaneously during an interview: “radical self-educators challenge the ‘tyranny of credentials.’” I’ll explain what I meant by “tyranny of credentials.”
(Regular readers may remember the original article which appeared in full at Rabble.ca and TheTyee.ca, written by Steve Howard, Nicole Veerman, and Jim Saunders while they were studying journalism at UWO.)
Much of the article is about the edupunk movement. But note that “edupunk” didn’t originally refer to DIY education. Jim Groom coined it for a more open source approach to technology in higher ed: e.g. using WordPress and other free tools instead of buying sophisticated software that’s often less effective. He isn’t interested in bringing down public education and he’s a little distressed to see “edupunk” coopted by for-profit interests (also see the response from Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U, for another perspective).
My aim isn’t to bring down public education either. I think big institutions can coexist with what I do — and with other approaches as well. By complaining about the “tyranny of credentials” I was aiming at the stranglehold that that whole way of thinking has on the theory and practice of learning. I mean, there are some things that are best learned in classrooms, some things that are best learned through apprenticeships, etc, and then there are things we can only learn by taking responsibility for mastering them ourselves.
It was 2002 when I committed myself to self-education. It wasn’t just something that I decided to do one day, nor was it caused by any particular frustration or resentment of “the system” (though that wasn’t exactly absent). What caused me to commit was simply realizing I was already settling into a purposeful and disciplined course of study on my own. All I did was recognize what I was already doing. Two years after getting a B.A. and trying to narrow down my list of options — I was equally torn between a bohemian-style artistic existence, academic research, a business career, or something socially entrepreneurial (“anything creative,” I used to say) — it occurred to me that I could combine all of those by working a little harder and focusing on exactly what I do right now: reading and working my ass off to develop and advocate a more open, fluid, agile style of education and discourse (for those of us who want it).
I’ve been accused of trying to be a jack of all trades (thus master of none), but if you look closely I’m trying to answer a narrow range of specific questions:
- What is creativity?
- Why do ideas, cultural norms, values, and institutions evolve the way they do?
- How can we learn to manage these changes more effectively?
In essence it’s old-fashioned philosophy: the kind that isn’t taught in any philosophy department, but is sorely wanted by people and organizations facing complex challenges and an uncertain future.
What I see underlying virtually all of our biggest problems (not just in education but in society in general) is a tendency to rest too firmly (and passively) on ideas and practices that solved the problems of the past; by persisting in those ways, we don’t just preserve the same old solutions, we preserve the same old problems as well — something we can’t do forever, as new complications continue to develop, making it harder and harder to either maintain the status quo or update things to suit new realities.
Credentials and titles work like that, sometimes: once representing knowledge and vocational competence, they increasingly represent only competence for working the system and later navigating the politics of large organizations…
We need stability and conservation but we also need flexibility and innovation. Much of the latter has to be learned autonomously, without all the trappings of formal education, which tend to reinforce passive receptiveness (or a habit of exploiting structural weaknesses), and dampen the adventurous spirit that we were essentially born with — and which times like this call for in larger doses.
So no, I don’t want to do away with credentials and formal schools altogether, I want to do away with the passive deference with which society tends to serve them. It blinds us to emerging problems and challenges.
My feeling is that we can’t generate enough openness and imagination to restructure (i.e. preserve) our institutions unless people working inside those institutions can feed off of the energy circulating around outside them, through initiatives and enterprises like my own: entrepreneurial projects (in the broadest sense of the word, not just in the sense of people trying to get rich). We need to learn to appreciate stories of personal goals and accomplishments that can’t be understood exclusively in terms of professional titles and extrinsic rewards. Otherwise we can’t even communicate our aims and lessons learned outside the officially sanctioned formats.
Or maybe I’m basically wrong and this is just my personal bias coming through…
You’ll have to think critically about what I’ve said and judge for yourself — which is, after all, the whole point.
