Post by Steven Dale
Everyone’s a Professional nowadays. If you get paid to do something, you’re a Professional. We have Professional Bloggers, Professional Trend-Watchers and Professional Competitive Eaters. Being a Professional is about as common as being a homo sapien.
I think it’s the direct result of our culture of credentials. If you’ve got the credentials, you’re a Professional. Competency is irrelevant if you’ve got the proper letters beside your name.
The late, great Jane Jacobs devoted a whole chapter to this problem in her final book Dark Age Ahead. “Credentialing, not educating,” Jacobs wrote “has become the primary business of North American universities.”
Our cities don’t need more Professionals any more than they need more credentials. What we need instead are ideas, action, creativity and competency. We need to stop judging people by their credentials and judge them instead by their competency, creativity and strength of character.
We especially need to be suspicious of those whose sense of esteem rests solely on their credentials and their alma mater. Esteem without competency, after all, is narcism.
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