Knowledge and Credentials

One of the unstated principles that lies behind what I do on this blog is that knowledge and credentials are essentially unrelated concepts. I came to this understanding by initially attending a university and discovering that they had absolutely nothing to offer me in my most important need. I went there to learn how to play the classical guitar and they had just lost their guitar teacher. Instead they assigned me lessons on piano and a chamber music group where I would be playing lute!

The first time I met someone with a bachelor's degree that really didn't seem to me to be educated just underlined this for me. Don't get me wrong, it was that first university that opened the doors to knowledge for me--well, their library, mostly! And a few professors. But the acquiring or not of a degree is a quite different thing from the acquiring of knowledge. I have learned more outside of class than I ever did in class. In fact, with probably too much honesty, I used to tell my students when I taught classical guitar at university, that I could not teach them to play guitar--that they had to do themselves. All I could do was guide them, offer encouragement and criticism as needed and provide them with the appropriate materials. They had to do all the actual work!

I bring this up because I just read a very thoughtful article on the slow rot of the university credential titled "Death by Degrees". Here is a telling quote:

Introductory economics courses paint “rent-seekers” as gruesome creatures who amass monopoly privileges; credential-seekers, who sterilize the intellect by pouring time and money into the accumulation of permits, belong in the same circle of hell.

Worth reading for what it reveals about the situation in universities today.

Of course blogs are a great threat to all those credentialed dispensers of knowledge because they can't prevent us from dispensing our knowledge. Or opinion, whatever! University departments of music tend to dispense a standard view of aesthetic value, though they usually call it 'importance'. So-and-so is an important composer and we will talk about him all the time while this other guy is not and we will never mention him. There is sort of a standard model of music history.

The nice thing about doing a blog is that you can present a NON-standard model. I can say on this blog (and have) that most of what John Cage did was a joke. And someone like Shostakovich is a thousand times better as a composer. Nothing sterile about my intellect.

Credentialed vs Educated

The blogfather Glenn Reynolds--Instapundit--has been blogging about the Higher Education Bubble. He suggests that higher education has an inflated value at this time and is often not worth the huge associated costs. Here are some posts. He makes the distinction between credentialed vs educated. That's an interesting idea. In my academic career it didn't seem to be an issue. I was in the performance end of things where how good you were depended simply on how well you played. But I did notice, more and more, that in a lot of academia, even in music, it was credentials that did make a difference. Some schools were really focused on education, others more on credentialization. As a matter of fact, I studied in the best places you could go as a classical guitarist: the Instituto Musical "Oscar Espla" in Alicante, Spain and the Hochschule fur Musik "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Austria. But I didn't even bother to pick up the certificates at the end of the courses. They were of virtually no significance. The only thing that mattered was what you got out of it. I was shocked once to meet a guitarist from Tennessee who had a masters degree in performance on guitar but had never even played an etude by Villa-Lobos. I also noticed that one university at which I taught was never, ever going to award an assistant professorship to a guitarist. Wrong instrument. But an oboist was a different story. The 'credential' in that case was: orchestral instrument vs vaguely bohemian and academically suspect instrument. In the composition end of things, credentialism is pretty important. Most composers with academic posts have to be in line with the current fashions. For a long time it was atonal serialism. I'm not sure what it is right now.

Of course, now I see better how the game is played. It is really all about career. Career in the sense of professional employment, benefits, institutional support and tenure. Guaranteeing yourself a secure job. That used to have no appeal to me--but I'm starting to see the pluses! It just doesn't have anything to do with music.