The frieze of clay faces on the school playground wall is cheerful, touching, and was no doubt an empowering and exciting experience for the kids involved. Possibly it also built a bit of local community. These are precious things. But is it of equal aesthetic value to a Rodin sculpture? Obviously not.
We're glad to be able to google the diagnosis our doctor gave us and read up: it gives us a sense of control and helps us manage changes in our lives. But we also recognise that they offer an expertise that isn't google-able, an expertise about what else to look out for, to recognise the unexpected, the apparently unconnected, to know what is worrying and what isn't.
We still need experts and skillful people. I want people with a deep knowledge of the history and culture of other nations to be doing the international diplomacy - perhaps not only those who've trod the traditional rather privileged pathways, but certainly not someone like me, who's never been in charge of more than a handful of people.
We're glad to be able to google the diagnosis our doctor gave us and read up: it gives us a sense of control and helps us manage changes in our lives. But we also recognise that they offer an expertise that isn't google-able, an expertise about what else to look out for, to recognise the unexpected, the apparently unconnected, to know what is worrying and what isn't.
We still need experts and skillful people. I want people with a deep knowledge of the history and culture of other nations to be doing the international diplomacy - perhaps not only those who've trod the traditional rather privileged pathways, but certainly not someone like me, who's never been in charge of more than a handful of people.
The problem is that it's not easy to separate respect for the skill from respect for the person. Expertise worth the name is not detachable into expert systems and certainly not into online searches. It's an integral understanding, an awareness of context. Expertise is when knowledge becomes tacit knowledge.
But the fact that it's so bound up with the experts who embody it, means that it's very hard to see how to give equal value to the non-expert. Maybe everyone is an expert at something, but this requires the summoning up of some rather specious expertises - an expert in their own experience? A baby can be nothing else, no matter how precious.
Possibly we need to relearn how to value the path to expertise, which is full of highly unfashionable virtues like attention, respect for mastery, patient practice, and perseverance over many years. The current tendency to default to an interactive approach, and the both-sides-of-any-question media promote the idea that every point of view is somehow equal. We reject the making of judgements. The trouble is that we make them anyhow. Just in a less well-informed way.
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