“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” – G.K. Chesterton
Throughout my career, I have worked closely with educated people, engineers, educators, doctors — even lawyers. Some of them are highly educated. I consider myself educated. I have worked most of my life as a space engineer (the fabled rocket scientist) and have a master’s degree. After nearly five decades of working closely with educated people, I have to agree with G. K. Chesterton (certainly the epitome of an educated man) that you fall into error when you start taking educated people seriously.
That does not mean you should not take what they say and write seriously. You should always weigh ideas seriously. But you should do that regardless of the education of the person providing the ideas. Someone without an education beyond an eighth-grade level may offer a better solution for repaving your driveway than someone with a Doctorate of Education. Similarly, someone with an advanced degree in engineering physics may offer a better understanding of boundary layer separation at transonic speeds than someone who has apprenticed as a plumber. (Or, for that matter, someone with a doctorate in English.)
In both cases, the subject matter expert can explain the why of the solution if the idea is sound. (If either falls back on “Because I know it is so. I am the expert — you are not” start to worry. If they cannot explain the foundations of their ideas, those foundations are probably sand on a beach.) It is the soundness of the ideas, not the credentials of those propounding them that matters.
Even within their fields the highly educated and the expert can propound potty nonsense. One has only to look at the CDC over the last three years to have multiple examples of experts offering guidance and advice that was not only wrong, but deadly. In every case, when their ideas were challenged, they fell back on “Look at my degrees. Look at my education. Respect my authority!” In every case, that made them no more right, and no less wrong.
One’s education is independent of whether one is right or wrong. Throughout my career, I have met numerous experts who were wrong about something within their area of expertise. Sometimes it was me that fell into that error. Often the error, if uncorrected, could have deadly consequences. Sometimes it was because they were acting on partial information. On other occasions, it was because they would not discard a misconception. In a few cases, it was because they had a vested interest in the wrong answer.
The good ones, when challenged, reevaluate their conclusions through the lens of criticism. The bad ones fall back on their credentials. (Credentialism is the curse of the 21st Century.)
I am not advocating for ignorance. Ignorance is not necessarily a function of education or its lack. It is a function of the presence or absence of knowledge. Even the highly educated can be ignorant if their education has failed to provide necessary knowledge or provided counterfeit knowledge. Even those without education can be knowledgeable if they have gained it through experience. Rather, I caution others never to accept the education of others at more than face value — and adjust your evaluation of them through your interactions with them, independent of their education. Or as Chesterton advises, don’t take the educated too seriously.
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