THE DAWN OF THE END OF THE AGE OF CREDENTIALISM  

Ever since the day in the late 1690s when the German university at Halle first issued an academic degree, modern society has been isolating and fracturing studies into ever and ever smaller particles. This worked well for awhile, especially on mechanical assembly lines, but the net effect appears to have put more and more control in the hands of specialists, who by definition, have learned less and less. While this helped speed up the Industrial Age for a few centuries, it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction. While their view of the world become ever smaller, those same specialists started to reveal that everything is related and is part of a much larger picture. Today, few are aware that they have been moving in the wrong direction. Their credentials have turned into documents of incompetence, in general or overall scientific knowledge. What matters a person's specific knowledge about the activities of the Peruvian termite, if he knows not how it relates to the stars?

The dilemma is amplified by the changing environment around us. In every sphere, new products, new techniques and new goals, are making specialists obsolete overnight. Only many multi-disciplined generalist observers are able to see even some of the relationships that exist. Their numbers are extremely small. Perhaps less than one percent of all PhD.'s. If one has specialized for 20 years in metallurgical cutlery, what can he know about knives made not of metal but of sand? The answers, I have been told, is that he will quickly learn the new field. Well today so can many other people. Not in 20 years or 20 months but in 20 days.

The monopoly power given to institutions who issue such credentials will shortly crumble, as will all monopolies under the swift-flowing currents of change. What value printed paper when times become turbulent. This applies as well to paper credentials as to paper money, paper assets and paper tigers.

Every day we see jobs, once thought to be permanent, disappear. Remember the milkman, the elevator operator, the trolley conductor, the chauffeur, the telegraph operator, the blacksmith, the cowboy, the railroad fireman and the steam engineer. These were specialists in a mechanical age. As the Communications Age flowers and the age of things mechanical fades away, specialized knowledge also fades as far more complex conditions, global in scale arise. To solve these problems, learning takes on new meaning. In the past we learned the known, from teachers, indoctrinated by those who preceded them in the days of minimal change. Now we must learn the unknown. The known is available in femtoseconds from a data bank. Why has Japan reduced student intake at teacher training schools by 40 percent. Because they are aware that we are moving from a teaching to a learning environment. When that occurs, society requires knowledge navigators to replace teachers.

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