from Life Learning magazine, January/February 2003
Knowledge & the Cult of Experts
by Wendy Priesnitz

Ever since the Industrial Revolution created the need for specialized knowledge to run equipment and manage employees, our education system has been creating a cult of experts – people who spend large portions of their working lives focusing on increasingly narrow ranges of highly specialized information. In a market-driven economy, these “experts” are able to charge for access to the information they “own”. Even the basic keys to life like genetics are now being patented and turned into commodities for sale to the highest bidder.

Most of us willingly pay others to design and build our houses, program our computers, settle our legal disputes, entertain us, grow our food and cure our illnesses. We do not have time to look after these aspects of daily life for ourselves because we are too busy pursuing our own fields of expertise.

But there is more to it than that. The “experts” have an interest in convincing us that what they know how to do is too difficult, time-consuming or complicated for the rest of us to learn. And because we have bought into the assumption that we can only “get knowledge” by being painstakingly taught by highly schooled experts, we do not recognize or value the knowledge, wisdom and skills that we have gained, often incidentally, on our own. So even those of us who want to build our own houses, program our own computers, entertain ourselves or look after our own health do not feel qualified to do so.

Even if we wanted to learn these skills, it would be difficult. Many of them are not taught in school and even people who have such skills often do not value them enough to pass them along to their children or other young people. We have been conditioned not to think of ourselves as self-reliant people who can do these things...or teach ourselves to do them. School has taught us to be emotionally and intellectually dependent.

The issue is complicated by the fact that we rank some types of knowledge as more important than other types, often based on the relative amount of physical effort required or the amount of money they earn. For instance, the ability to fix a car or build a house, which require physicality and a tolerance for dirt, rank lower on the prestige scale than more intellectual tasks like programming a computer or doing genetic research.

This obsession with ranking people by their jobs and salaries extends to most other aspects of life. Sports fans rank athletes and teams; beauty contests rank the best looking women; orchestra members are ranked by the way they sit; business magazines rank the most profitable and fastest growing companies; newspapers rank the year’s or the century’s most important news stories. Being surrounded by all this comparing and ranking leads us to compare ourselves with other people – or to an unattainable (and often nonexistent) set of criteria.

If this sort of comparing and competing encouraged us to fulfill our own potential, it might be useful. Unfortunately for many people, it merely results in reduced self-esteem because we do not measure up to some “expert” standard.

Categorizing and ranking ourselves and our activities in this way begins in school. Poor readers are separated from good readers. Those with behavioral difficulties or different learning styles are put into special education classes. The most academically inclined students are separated off for a few hours a day for “enrichment” activities. A prize is offered to the student who reads the most books or completes the fanciest science project. Competition is everywhere, from spelling contests and math drills to the sports field.

One of the stranger – and most arbitrary – ways we categorize people in schools is by age. The production line method of education requires this linear type of age segregation. It is not the best way for people to learn, nor is it even the best way to socialize people. Most North American schools were ungraded until the second half of the 19th century, although they were already well established in Germany at that time. As John Taylor Gatto points out, the European model came from a belief that a group of minds can be organized in the same manner that a military officer directs the body movements of a group of soldiers.

In reality, all this type of sorting does is hamper those students who learn more slowly or more quickly than the norm, which sets the pace. Besides, we adults do not arrange our working or social lives in that way, so why should we require it of our children? Historian Joseph Kett has demonstrated that the natural social life of American children prior to age-segregated schooling consisted of groups of people from ages eight to 22. Kett has also conducted research in collaboration with juvenile justice experts that suggests youth crime may result from an age-segregated youth culture.

At any rate, this ranking and sorting process prepares us to accept an adult life where the “experts” are separated from the rest of us, whose jobs may be boring and uninspiring. White collar (“expert”) jobs are not really seen as jobs at all, but as “career positions”. This type of work allows the “experts” to advance them selves on an increasingly lucrative career path, while blue collar jobs are seen as dead-end situations. In this type of scenario, success is defined by improved social status and high income rather than by personal satisfaction or the implementation of talents and skills for personal or societal benefit. When we allow ourselves to be ranked by our careers, we also allow ourselves to make life decisions based on what would look good on a résumé, rather than on what we enjoy doing or on what would help us grow and develop our potential.

This is not the way young children behave. They define themselves in many ways all at once. They are dancers, singers, mathematicians, scientists, athletes and engineers. They try everything without worrying about which ones they like best, are better in, are more important in society’s ranking, or in which they have special training. Then somewhere along the way – often earlier in their young lives rather than later – we persuade them to become “experts”. We narrow their minds and their imaginations so they will begin to concentrate on a career goal, to think of themselves as only scientists or engineers. We channel them into specialties, which require specialized training.

Although many careers properly require specialized training, this narrowing of our focus, when allied with the cult-of-experts mentality, feeds dependency on other people who are “experts” in their fields. So we consume entertainment produced by others rather than making our own music in our own living rooms. We purchase half-ripe, pesticide-laden, semi-nutritious food grown by others rather than growing our own. We even buy a prepackaged greeting card for a loved one because we do not believe in our own ability to wish them happy birthday more effectively in person.

How crippling this is for the human spirit! As a writer, I often speak to people who love to write and who are quite proficient at stringing words together effectively, but who do not see themselves as writers. Why not? Because they did not study writing at university or because they do not make their living selling words. I always tell them the truth as I see it: If you write, you are a writer. If you paint, you are a painter. If you play with numbers, you are a mathematician. And you can be many of these at the same time.

In my conversations with them, I have helped some of these people challenge the assumption that you need to be highly trained, narrowly specialized and spectacularly talented to pursue an interest in a certain field...or to take your place among others in that community of interest. Or that pursuing your passion should be relegated to hobby status while you do “real work” during the day.

Everything about our education system is geared to perpetuating these assumptions. None of it is designed to enhance the learning process or make us happier, more fulfilled people. It is designed to ensure that our little piece of expertise fits tightly into the global economic puzzle. School teaches us how to become good workaholics so we can contribute to the Gross National Product and generate profits for our employers.

Occasionally, we hear about someone who has stepped off the treadmill and dropped out of a high powered career at mid-life, having played the game but not feeling they have won much. So we have a computer scientist beginning a second life as a cello player. Or a stock broker developing his talent as a baseball player. Or a successful corporate executive enrolling in divinity college.

If only our whole society could experience the life-changing paradigm shift undergone by those brave souls who thumb their noses at the cult of experts. Few people question the fact that most of the big problems we are dealing with today – environmental degradation, ethical challenges around biotechnology, poverty and hunger, to name a few – have been created or managed by graduates from the world’s best schools. But still, we continue to revere the members of this cult of experts. The growing number of life learners, on the other hand, are leading the way toward a more self-reliant, less expert-reliant society by having the faith that they and their children can learn whatever they want to learn...sometimes with the guidance of an "expert" mentor and sometimes through their own devices.

Wendy Priesnitz is the editor of Life Learning Magazine. This article is adapted from her book Challenging Assumptions in Education: From Institutionalized Education to a Learning Society.

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