Dear Martin,
Thanks for your reply. I’m a bit overloaded these days. My computer did something utterly mysterious last week, destroying most of my files, and I have been working to rebuild things. It will take me a few weeks to return with a cogent reply. As it is, I wrote something recently about two issues you discussed. In addition, the Journal She Ji published an article by Peter Murphy that addresses some of the questions you raise.
The first of the two issues involves a point on which you read my comments in a different way than I intended. You quoted me:
KF- In my view, governments that decided to force skilled practicing professionals to earn a research degree to teach advanced professional practice made a serious mistake. That’s something we cannot unravel.
Your reply was:
MS- As above- the fact that some subjects/ disciplines require 'skilled professional practice' does not automatically mean that they are not 'knowledge-based’.
The professions I describe are indeed knowledge-based. To engage in any skilled profession, the practitioner must develop a rich stock of knowledge and experience, mastering them through learning, training, developmental practice, and then the kind of extended professional engagement and experience that leads to advanced mastery. I’m not going to attempt to define knowledge — but I will say here that knowledge involves more than abstract ideas or thoughts. It involves an ability to apply what one knows to the context and needs of a situation. It also involves the ability to integrate new facts into one’s personal stock of knowledge, and to integrate new skills.
In this sense, a skilled barrister will often seek applicable legal precedents that he or she can argue as the foundation for a current case. In some cases, a skilled barrister will see a way to draw on prior precedent in a way that makes it applicable even though no one had earlier seen how to do this. In a similar way, a skilled surgeon or anaesthesiologist learns a new procedure by taking part of the procedure with an experienced team, observing, working, and integrating the procedure into an established repertoire of skills.
Two summers ago, I had a non-invasive heart procedure that required stopping my heart and restarting it with a computer-based system to adjust the rhythm. The Kalmar hospital normally performs about two of these procedures a week — and part of the limit is staffing. My team had two cardiologists, one senior, one junior, and two senior anaesthesiologists. They explained to me that junior cardiologist was observing to learn the procedure. There were so many introductions and so much hand-shaking that I’ve forgotten why the team had two anaesthesiologists, but it may have had something to do with one skilled senior anaesthesiologist learning the specific procedure from another. With so many experts on hand, everything went smoothly. The worst part of the experience was the hospital coffee they served me while I read a book in the recovery room as they kept an eye on my heart for a few hours.
Similar issues apply to master chefs, master jewellers, and great athletes. For those who like crime movies or the Netflix show Elementary, similar issues apply to master thieves, criminal masterminds, and the great detectives who catch them.
To speak of professional skill, one speaks of knowledge *and* the ability to apply that knowledge judiciously.
The other issue you raised involves something quite at odds from what I meant. You quoted me:
KF- The result is often a PhD degree (third cycle level 8 doctorate) for people who may be excellent at what they do without being able to do research. This is an unfortunate outcome with problematic consequences for the world.
You replied:
MS- I'm not sure if there is evidence to back this statement up but once again this seems to perpetuate the idea of a skill-based state of 'being excellent at what they do' (i.e. being in possession of a god-given magic skill).
None of this involves “god-given magic skill.” It involves the journey from apprentice status to mastery. As I wrote earlier, a skilled professional practice requires developing rich stocks of knowledge and experience, mastering them through learning, training, developmental practice, and then the kind of extended professional engagement and experience that leads to advanced mastery. There is nothing magical about this.
It does involve two caveats. One caveat is that developing a skill involves some form of aptitude. Most human beings seem to develop some skills more easily than others. Those who are fortunate enough to have great teachers, mentors, or coaches can often discover within themselves the capacity to develop skills that were not readily apparent. And many of these capacities are more widely distributed than most of us realise — people do not develop them because our education system doesn’t always work well for different kinds of learners. In some cases, schools fail to offer a solid learning context. In others, classes and course sequence lack the kind of scaffolded curriculum that enables people to develop skills more effectively than other methods.
But some people are simply more skilled for some reason. They have some combination of capacity, passion, and the will to work toward mastery. My father was a great athlete. He enjoyed swimming, gymnastics, dancing, and running. At different times in his life, we worked as a lifeguard and a coach. In college, even though he was only an inch taller than I am, and not much heavier, he served as a bottom man of an inverted pyramid of gymnasts four layers tall. In old age, he jogged until reaching his late 80s. He had to stop jogging at the age of 88. Grinding out long runs was bad for his knees, and that ruined his tennis game. He played tennis, danced, and bicycled until a few months before his death at 96. Alas, I am no where near as athletic. I only began to take the gym seriously at the age of 66 to keep my back in shape and to develop better cardiovascular capacity.
It’s not a matter of “god-given magic skill.” It is a matter of capacity and will — as a young man, my father worked very hard to become a good athlete. He also did other things. He was a model of the ancient classical ideal citizen, and he worked hard to do well at the many things he did. In his 60s and 70s, he started to learn computing. He had a huge library of programs that he learned to use just because he thought it was fun to operate them. He also played about 30 musical instruments. Here, his passion outran his skill — but he never studied music. Instead, he thought it was fun to teach himself to play.
Two of my skills are writing and editing. I often help other authors learn to write better. It took many years to develop my own skill as a writer. Working with skilled editors, and working as an editor myself, I have developed this skill. It’s more than a matter of catching and correcting mistakes. It involves showing an author why one phrase works better than another — and showing authors how to try different phrases or approaches to a sentence to see which among several choices works best. It’s a matter of helping an author to find his or her voice — and to find a voice that “sounds” natural on the printed page. Most of all, it requires helping a writer to learn to write in a way that will read well and sound good while communicating the author’s ideas to a reader.
This is not a god-given magic skill. It took practice. It took me more than six decades to develop my current skill as a writer and my ability to help others learn to write better.
But now the second caveat. Some people do have a gift for some art or practice to a degree so much greater than the rest of us that it seems to us to be a “god-given magic skill.” The gift seems so miraculous that it seems divine to the rest of us. If you forget the jealousy and antagonism in Milos Forman’s 1984 movie, Amadeus, you can hear the appreciation of Mozart’s divine gift when Antonio Salieri’s speaks about Mozart’s music. (For the record, the real Salieri and the real Mozart were friends — Peter Shaffer took artistic liberties in shaping his stage play and the screenplay he built on it.)
I am a good writer, excellent at times. Nevertheless, I read great writers with awe. Ursula Le Guin died yesterday. To me, her skill was miraculous. I have learned how to write better narrative prose by reading Le Guin — but I cannot make the leap between a better Ken Friedman and the great Ursula Le Guin.
The historian Gordon S. Wood is another exemplar for me. To read his collection of book reviews about history books — The Purpose of the Past — is to listen to a master writer writing about the writer’s art while examining how it is that a writer in a specific field understands and contributes to the development of that field. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — Wood’s last book — sits here on my shelf. I have not yet read it. I’m waiting, because when I finish it, I will have finished the last work of a writer whose work I admire as an unparalleled master. He was a teacher I never met, one from whom I learned a great deal about the writer’s craft.
Anyone who loves great writing well enough to want to write well can become better through practice and effort. But there is a qualitative difference between the greatest and the rest of us. Anyone who attains genuine mastery does so at the price of a humility that recognises this difference.
This is why most of us who read and write English revere Shakespeare. Roland Emmerich’s 2011 movie Anonymous is fiction, delightful but imaginary. The closing words are as true for me as anything I know:
“Though our story is at an end, our poet's is not; for his monument is everliving. Not of stone, but of verse. And it shall be remembered. As long as words are made of breath ... and breath of life.”
Whatever skill it is that we practice involves knowledge. But some human beings perfect a skill to the point that it seems to the rest of us to be a divine gift. Their skills becomes legendary, seemingly magical skills of a nature so much higher than the rest of us possess that we must ourselves have attained mastery to recognise just how great their skills are.
Psychologists used to joke about the late psychologist and cognitive scientist Amos Tversky. Tversky’s work led to the field of behavioural economics, and many believe that he would have shared the Nobel Prize with Daniel Kahneman if he had not died at the age of 59. I understand that some of his colleagues used what the called the Tversky Test to determine intelligence. It was a tongue-in-cheek intelligence test that they applied to people in their field: “The faster you realised that Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were.”
That’s how I feel about the work of the great masters in my field. I may yet reach levels of achievement greater than I have attained so far, but I like to think that I am smart enough to be humble in the presence of great work. I do not attribute this to magic or to divine gifts — but I do recognise that those who rise to the level of an Ursula Le Guin or a Gordon Wood have genuinely attained a level of skill and mastery that rises above the skills that the rest of us possess.
It is not necessary to attain those heights to earn a PhD. It is only necessary to work in an area that is accessible to well formed research questions, and it is necessary to develop the research skills required to answer those questions.
In discussing research and discussing the PhD, I am discussing those specific kinds of knowledge that involve research. There are many legitimate kinds of knowledge. Only some of these legitimate kinds of knowledge involve research. If the PhD degree is a research degree rather than a degree in advanced professional practice, it must therefore involves those specific kinds of knowledge that engage with research. I wrote about this in a recent editorial for She Ji. You will find it here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.10.001
More important, Peter Murphy wrote a useful article on the central role that explanatory knowledge plays in the PhD degree. You will find it here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.09.002
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/ <http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/>
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman <http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman> | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn <http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn/>
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