THE ISOLATED PROFESSIONS

Professions used to be called mysteries, and certain skills must necessarily remain esoteric. But this practical training in a profession surprisingly seldom entails ideas and methods that are inexplicable, ineffable, or beyond the grasp of a genuinely educated layman. True experts seek ways to communicate. Psuedoexperts rely on the secrecy of their data for their place in society, claiming that disclosure of their secret lore would make them helpless, when actually it might only show them to be useless. . . .

Within these isolated professions the patronizing attitude toward outsiders becomes increasingly hard to avoid. Specialization in recent decades has made the old divisions of knowledge and the old careers even narrower and more excluding, with a consequent reduction of the number of people with whom the specialist feels any solidarity. This intellectual fragmentation has made it virtually impossible for universities to function as social units. The misplaced emphasis on career training and the isolation of the professions have produced a pair of effects which every teacher has seen in class. The first effect emerges in all on a given subject because they are not experts on it. Such people are the destined victims of false experts. The second effect emerges in those students who believe that anything they say sincerely is true. Much modern school teaching encourages this belief out of a fear of discouraging the free flow of creativity. These two forms of mindlessness reflect one another. By neglecting their intellectual contact with the untrained majority of humanity, our experts have driven that majority into a dim realm where, as nonexperts, they cannot think, but only feel. . . .