Choosing credentialing or experience?

In an interview about his recent book, “Making Good,” I asked Howard Gardner about the state of mentoring in the lives of the young professionals he was studying. “Credentialing is replacing experience,” Gardner said. He was lamenting our societal preoccupation with shortcuts to wisdom.

The remark reminded me of a conference with a parent who wanted to discuss her sixth-grade son’s failing science grade. She felt obliged, as she put it, to “defend her son’s resume.” I felt a huge disconnect. She did not share my view that the grade was an opportunity to better understand her son’s learning style. She saw only a problem to be corrected or erased, a tactic that denied him the benefit of his own experience.

What was to me a conversation about mentoring her son through an experience which would prepare him to be a “lifelong learner,” was to her a negotiation about the credentials that would prepare her son to be a lifelong achiever. Her plan for him was the life path on which credential begets credential, ad infinitum – a life summarized by a resume. She had abandoned his individuality for the great abstract notion of His Career.

My notion of the boy’s path involved multiple working hypotheses, a work in progress wherein rich, intimate, and intensely local experiences beget creativity, fulfillment, and possibility based on the deep skill that only experience can provide. A heretical notion? Well, at least not an easily quantifiable one.

Credentials are information about past experience, not the experience itself. Consider the illusion of intimacy embedded in the phrase “No Child Left Behind,” the acme of credentialing masked with the rhetoric of experience. “Child” gives us the whiff of an individual, yet the phrase ultimately holds childhood at arm’s length. And community, sense of direction, and emotional or intellectual content – wisdom? – are invisible, or phantom assumptions at best. Left behind by whom? On the way to what? Why? How? In the self-reflexive nature of slogans, it only serves to credential the credentialer.

Which is to say, that our national education imperative is reducing children to discrete achievements that can be conveniently counted, the whole point of credentialing, advertising, and propaganda. Learning is not just credentialing. Sure, there’s a place for standards in all professions – and they need to be high to raise aspiration. But merely raising standards does not raise effectiveness if it sets the bar in the same place for all.

The last 20 years in education will be remembered as the era of Gardner’s multiple intelligences, Mel Levine’s “all kinds of minds,” and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s psychology of “flow” experiences. Academic research has quickly trickled into the eager, pragmatic hands of teachers who now grasp the varied and individual nature of learning. How ironic that just as research is unlocking individual potential, politicians are hitching the education wagon to uniformity, in the name of accountability and progress?

A wise kindergarten teacher explained learning with this metaphor: “We are each at work on a personal, existential jigsaw puzzle.” Some of our puzzles comprise thousands of pieces, some only hundreds; some are photo-real images, some are Picassos.

Forty-four years after going to kindergarten, my puzzle has the bottom edge and two bottom corners pretty well finished. But there are an awful lot of those frustrating pieces left with only clouds and blue sky. And I’m just glad to have found that there are corners! Furthermore, I have not been given the box cover to see how I’m supposed to look at the end result! Neither have you.

This suggests we’ll never be finished. Life, after all, is a progressive education, and school is the locale for works in progress – at times a neatly quantifiable lab, but more often a messy experience.

How do you make credentials the “be all, end all” of that, without robbing the experience of uniqueness? You don’t, if curriculum standards have a credential-laden focus and abandon the learner to a kind of merit badge approach to experience. This creates sameness, convenience, narrowness rather than innovation, self-discovery, exploration in the company of wise mentors.

“Without mentoring,” Gardner says, “you’re thrown back on your early value system, plus what you learn from your peers and the media – unlikely to be sufficient.” We’ll never make good on the promise to leave no child behind if mentoring isn’t an educational imperative.

Todd R. Nelson is principal of the Adams School in Castine.