The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> of "experts" with their "degrees".....

of "experts" with their "degrees".....
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Sunday, July 21 2013, 16:49:11 (UTC)
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...no one here is saying that degrees and academic status are to be worshipped...but then neither are amateurs to be tolerated unless they go that extra mile. At least with a recognized expert you have something substantial to deal with...but no one is praying at the altar of any university.

In 1969 I entered UC Berkeley to study sculpture. The faculty was made up of people with advanced degrees, even what some would call experts. I lasted all of one day before transferring to the history department. What a lot of fools and foolish ideas there were in universities in the 70s. Six years later I returned to sculpture but this time I went were real experts could be found...to New York and the Near Eastern Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum where I studied for three years by copying true masters in between working days at art foundries.

After leaving college and before New York, I went to work as a volunteer investigator with the Public Defenders Office in their juvenile section. There too I ran afoul of the experts with degrees. Before studying Law I'd decided to work in the field to see if I was really up to it. The legal profession left me cold...I discovered I could have a freer hand working outside the system. I set up a group home for jubilant delinquents and in three years had 30 or so kids pass through my door. In the process I crossed swords with many experts but kept my license, the first to be issued to someone so young, and had my own in-house "treatment" center...only I never "treated" anyone except as a human bean in great need of help, not social work, but help and understanding.

Living there myself, full-time, 24/7, up in the attic of a huge house in Seattle's version of a ghetto, I quickly saw that my delinquents had little chance of growing and expanding within the system invented for them by scholars and academics. Many of my kids turned out to be quite gifted but there was no place for them to show or develop their gifts. Born to very bad parents and taken over by a system which all but forced them into remaining delinquent just so there would be somebody caring for them, as poor as that care was. So I took us all to an island out at sea and stranded us there for six weeks. This isn't the place to go into all that...suffice to say I had a family emergency which forced me to quit that line of work and move back to California.

I decided to go back to college, to the experts and scholars, and get one of them degrees everyone said you had to have if you were serious. I took a truckload of sociology classes and ran right smack into a wall of experts. In college at San Jose I had one professor give me a C- on a term paper...I challenged his grade and the paper was handed to another professor who gave it an A+. So much for experts. I had two other classes from a professor who one day stopped me on the way to one class with the suggestion that I stop coming to class and he would give me an "A" in each class. Was it bad breath? Then a professor in the psychology department contacted me and asked if I would give a lecture about my experience with dealing with jubilant delinquents at my group home and island adventure. More experts.

I next went to school in San Francisco where a professor circulated a petition within the department to have me expelled....the Dean squashed that and "taught" the subject to me herself. The point of all this is to say that I have no undue respect for experts in their field or in any field...they still have to make sense...they still have to be challenged.

Thankfully I stopped short, two classes shy of my degree...I walked out on a mid-term exam (and moved to New York) when I realized that I was being taught a shitload of useless information the only purpose of which was to allow me to turn right around and become another useless professor without ever having put any idea to actual practice...or tested much of anything.

What made my professors so angry was not that I didn't know the subject, didn't learn from them, but that I had had actual experience in the world dealing with people in innovative ways of my own making...I intruded on their classroom reality in ways that disturbed their equilibrium and challenged their "authority". But I'm one student who REALLY learned..learned enough to know I didn't need their degrees because I wasn't aiming to be their kind of expert.

...no matter the experts, you still have to THINK....and you should EXPERIENCE as much of Life as you can before graduating into a mold.



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