The Perils of Credentialism
Richard Cohen of Washington Post wrote an interesting, semi-serious rant on requiring a course in Algebra to graduate from high school. Here is an excerpt:
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I am haunted by Gabriela Ocampo. Last year, she dropped out of the 12th grade at Birmingham High School in Los Angeles after failing algebra six times in six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over ever getting it. So, according to the Los Angeles Times, she “gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus book room and, without telling a soul, vanished from Birmingham High School.” Here’s the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. |
While I personally loved math, I sympathize with him and Gabriela. But there is a deep problem here that Cohen doesn’t address. Schools and universities in the US are evolving to be “diploma mills” - something very familiar in India. Standardized testing is inexorably leading towards this. If you can’t pass the test, tough luck, you can’t “progress” in your education, even if the subject in question is not at all related to other subjects in which you may have flair.
And all of this in the name of enhancing the competitiveness, so employers can get “qualified” [by which people mostly mean “credentialed”] candidates. I disagree with this approach fundamentally. Credential-driven education is ultimately incompatible with capitalism and freedom [see Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman]. Its goal is to offer “standardized” norms to evaluate people, ignoring the infinite variety in people.
When such a system reaches its advanced terminal state, as it has reached in India, the end result is that credentials themselves start to carry little meaning, because the whole aim of schooling [as distinct from education] becomes getting that stamp of approval, so people learn to game the system towards that goal. In religious terms, God has left the temple.
Over the years, we at AdventNet have learnt to completely ignore credentials in our hiring, and go by our own subjective assessment instead. I say “subjective” because I don’t believe there can be any “objective” standards in evaluating human beings, because ultimately these are value judgements. For example, if we are hiring a sales person, a pleasant outgoing personality, good communication skills and a drive to succeed are important, and assessing all of these is an imprecise art. Why would the fact that the person flunked algebra in school be important?
American education is going in the wrong direction, but I would argue that it is precisely because of increasing government involvement, especially by federal and state governments. What was once a purely local affair has become increasingly federalized. This is inevitable - governments are not great at performing subjective value judgements, and if they tried, corruption would be the result. So to avoid that, they have to standardize, thereby robbing the system of flexibility to fit individual needs.
Gabriela, in that story above, may make an excellent saleswoman or an excellent doctor [most doctors I know are very poor at math!]. By flunking her out, the system is basically telling her “You are worthless”. And yet, the solution is not some self-esteem enhancement program favored by the left, effectively telling Gabriela “You are good at math” when she is not. The real solution is to get rid of credentialism, and leave the problem to the marketplace, which is perfectly capable of solving it. Milton Friedman outlines how this would work in Capitalism and Freedom, so I will spare the details.
I have a personal stake in this. I have a son with autism, and my wife and I recognize that he will need a highly individualized education. He has some strengths in areas like visual memory and pattern recognition, and major areas of weaknesses, like language. We believe his areas of strength could lead him to a fulfilling life, but only if we don’t inflict standardized education on him.