Turning Trades Into "Professions"

 A comment on today's Inside the Law School Scam post led me to this article.


Michael Lewis wrote it nearly two decades ago.  His criticisms of The Columbia School of Journalism are as relevant today as they were when he attended in 1992.  He derides the jargon and sheer abstruseness of much of the curriculum.  Being a journalist himself, and having contact with a number of the top editors of the time, he knew what a crock journalism schools actually were.  


Although the article made for some very entertaining reading, nothing in it surprised me.  When I was writing for a newspaper, I asked my editor whether I should get a journalism degree.  I could as well have asked him whether joining the circus would increase my chances of writing for The Times.  Then I asked whether I should take a journalism class.  "I guess we're paying you too much if you have that much money to waste," he said with mock indignation.  


Now, the reason I'm mentioning Lewis's article or my exchange with my editor is not merely to discuss the futility of going to journalism school: I already did that in an earlier post.  Rather, I want to mention another phenomenon I noticed upon finding Lewis's article in a comment on Professor Campos' blog.


In his article, Lewis quotes, among other people the writer Joseph Nocera, who called his journalism school a "glorified trade school."  Actually, in a way, it was even worse than a trade school because, he says, "it is impossible to recreate the journalism environment in the classroom."


What Nocera says about "j-school" is not so different from what many lawyers and other law school graduates say about law school.  Nearly all of the scambloggers say that people graduate law school unable to file a motion.  Worse, after spending six figures on tuition, they have to spend another thousand to take a class to help them pass the bar.  Many who pass say that the class was the only thing that helped them pass the bar; nearly everything they learned in law school courses was of no import.


At one time, law was considered a trade.  It still is in much of the world, including most European countries.  So, for that matter, are such "professions" as accounting and business management.  Not so long ago, medicine, engineering and teaching were in that category, too.  


It seems that colleges, universities and graduate programs started to turn trades into "professions" and became the gatekeepers of them about a century ago.  Before then, one didn't need to go to law school--or even college--to take the bar examination, or the licensing exams for most skilled trades.   Until about 1960, one also didn't need to go to college in order to become a librarian; one simply had to be interested in books.  Now it's all but impossible to get a job as a librarian without a Master of Library Science.


Now, of course, being a journalist and being a librarian are different from the other "professions" I've mentioned in that one doesn't have to take licensing exams for them as one must in, say, law, medicine or even teaching.  But those occupations were, as I mentioned previously, considered to be trades, albeit skilled ones.  One usually learns a trade through training with a practitioner and working in the trade. That, essentially, is how Abraham Lincoln learned how to be a lawyer.


Of course, I'm not foolish or naive enough to suggest that doctors should train entirely through such a method.  Given the complexity of the work done in that area, and the advances in technology, doctors really do need to know things they might not learn on the job.  And they need to know enough to understand what's in the medical journals.  One might also say that engineering is now too complex to be learned solely on the job.  


On the other hand, some trades/professions really can be lerarned only through practice.  Journalists, like other writers, learn how to write by writing and reading.   Also, no amount of training will turn someone who doesn't have an inquisitive mind into a worthwhile reporter.  If you can't get to the heart of a story--or the story, period--simply having a journalism degree won't do it for you. 


If anything, "j-school" will only make things worse, as so much of it, as Lewis points out, is predicated on complicating the simple and normal, just as so much of law school teaching is done with "hypotheticals" that have about as much chance of happening in the real world as I have of marrying Denzel Washington.


The end result is that as academic institutions turn trades into professions, the relevance of the education to the trade is less and less.  And the costs and risks increase for students.  About the only ones who benefit are the administrators of those schools and programs.