Professionalisation

The pressure for economic growth is bloating the economic sphere as other arenas diminish in importance. Increasingly many activities such as looking after the eldery or bringing up children, previously motivated largely by social factors, are now being done on a professional basis.

By replacing personal relationships with financially regulated ones, professionalisation weakens friendship, crowds out altruistic transactions and minimises individuals' room to exercise personal considerations, eroding the give and take that make up a healthy community. It is also part of the vicious social cycle underway in many societies, in which productive activity is threatened by a spiralling of competitive claims over resources.

Apprenticeships and other relationship-based methods of education skill sharing are replaced by formal, automated methods of instruction and stricter, top-down certification of competence. Rent-seeking centralised bodies are established that monopolise assessment of competence. Laws are passed, often citing grounds such as public safety, that make more and more activities the exclusive remit of certified 'professionals' - that is, individuals who have bought in to a particular power structure.

Professionalisation is often justified on grounds that it raises standards, but in fact this is just one of many possible effects. The clearest effect it has on professionals is probably a homogenisation of the range of services provided and a rise in their prices. The effect it has on non-professionals is clearer. Erecting such barriers of entry to 'professionalised' activites increases their potential for revenue by discouraging individuals from engaging in (or even understanding) such activity themselves. Feelings of powerlessness abound as individual consumers are encouaged to trust neither in their own, nor one anothers' capabilities, but only in accredited 'professionals', whose main motivation is money.

Professional training is the big brother of schooling. Although it damages both the individual and the social interplay that characterises a healthy community, it continues apace because it is associated with economic growth. We at altruists are privileged to do our work as amateurs, who aim to ignore money and work for love instead. Our work on an altruistic theory of economics is an effort to extend this freedom to others.

FURTHER READING:

» Jeff Schmidt: Disciplined Minds,

Downloads Title Author(s)         Date        Reference  Beyond Money  John Taylor Gatto  On Professionalism  Howard Zinn