Not everyone goes to graduate school to get a professional degree. Not everyone goes to college. Not everyone finishes high school. Not everyone has to. There are plenty of creditable and valuable things people can do without those levels of education.
But lots of people do finish high school, and go to college, and earn post-graduate degrees. It's a lot of time, money, and work. And plenty of people take a different, and shorter, route, and attend trade schools. Then, they apprentice.
In a less formal, and more general, way, it is often said that to develop expertise, someone has to spend 10K hours doing something.
If you take the longest possible route, and finish high school, finish college, and complete a post-graduate program in something, you have a very clear sense of what you knew at the end that you didn't know at the beginning. And it's clear to you how you got to know what you finally know. As I said, it's a lot of time and work, and even once you get to the part where you start making money, instead of spending it on your education, most professionals call what they do "practice." You're always learning. And the people who depend on your professional ability count on you to know a lot, and to continue to learn more.
All of that is the value of a professional education, and a professional degree. There are two burdens of a professional education. One is that since you never stop learning, you always have to learn more. Real professional learning is not made easy. You're living your life, carrying out your profession, and trying to figure out which "learning" offerings are legitimate, and which are not. Lots of them are not. It's part of your job to figure out which are the scams, and what's just vogue, but not really true. It never gets easy.
The other burden of a professional education is that as you have realized (it's not hard to realize) how much you know at the end, even of the formal academic part, that you didn't know at the beginning, you also realize how limited you are with respect to the professional educational opportunities you didn't pursue. It's humbling to know, and appreciate, how much other professionals know that you don't know. You chose profession A, and they chose profession B. Or, in my case, specialty A versus specialty B. Each of you chose to know a lot about this or that, and little or nothing about that or this.
But people who don't have professional educations and degrees don't necessarily understand what it takes, and what it means, to have a professional education. If they don't assume that a professional knows more about the area in question than they do, then they're out to sea without a paddle.
The common daily example I deal with of that, in this computer age, where everything and anything seems so accessible, is people who either self-diagnose or develop a preference for a certain approach to treatment, because they've been online. I am very straightforward with people who do this (there are loads of people who do this). I tell them that I will beg them, on my knees if necessary, not to look stuff up online. They have no idea from where it comes, who put it there, how truly qualified the sources are, what's their motivation, and frankly, if what they find is even remotely true. I tell them that's what they have me for. And if they're afraid to trust me, then either they have trust issues, or they should find someone they feel they can trust better. I spend way too much of my time disabusing patients of wrong "information" they've gotten for themselves online, and to which they become attached.
Less personal to me as a professional is the group of people who form completely unsupported, and flagrantly wrong, conclusions about things like the coronavirus, or vaccines against it, or Tony Fauci. We're talking about people who are not epidemiologists, or medical doctors at all, or have had professional training of any kind.
What's curious is someone like Ron DeSantis. DeSantis does have a professional degree. He's a lawyer. It should be clear to him (or Ted Cruz, or Josh Hawley, or others) how little they knew about the law before they got their professional educations, and how much they know about it now, after they got educated. They should understand how complicated and difficult is a professional education, and they should be capable of recognizing how little they know about professions in which they were not educated. Yes, of course I realize -- I've said it a million times -- that no one can adhere to the Rep/con agenda without being a hypocrite, dishonest, or both, but you would think that at the very least, people like them would recognize the value of their own educations, and be able to make the same assumptions about the value of other people's educations. I don't think it's a good enough excuse to say they only went to law school for three years, while a doctor goes to medical school for four years, then internship for a year, then residency for anywhere from three to six years, and maybe a fellowship to follow, and they just didn't realize. They should have humility enough to realize how much they learned in their three years, and to assume, even if they thought doctors only learn formally for three years, that a doctor must know vastly more about medicine than they do. They don't mind the value of their training and degrees, and they should gracefully accept the burden, or limitation, of them.
DeSantis has lurched like a pinball about what he spouts about management of the coronavirus, about which he knows nothing, and should realize he knows nothing. He'll say vaccination (he's one of the ones who refuses to reveal if he and his family were vaccinated) is very effective, and at the same time, he'll say all this worry about the coronavirus, and wearing masks, is childish nonsense. And he thinks his big accomplishment is that he found some crackpot doctor in California who claims to agree with him. (The rest of us don't.) But if DeSantis was an honorable and honest, and appropriately aware and humble, professional, he would realize and appreciate that he knows much more about the law than does someone who never went to law school, and that any epidemiologist, or doctor of any specialty, that he can pluck from his own state, knows much more about medicine than he does. He just wants the value, but he doesn't want to have to deal with the burden, of a professional education and degree.
I wonder if politics, especially being a Rep/con, is like extreme intoxication, and it totally prevents clear thinking. Or maybe Reps/cons are -- I don't know -- hypocrites, dishonest, or both.
You said it. Operative word: humility.
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