Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future
I had wanted to comment on this article in the nytimes...but it must have struck a nerve out there, since they closed the comments...
Anyway, this article really struck a chord with me...
After handing in all of the necessary forms and documents to graduate from medical school, the university administration office lost my libretto...
This was in the 70's, in Italy...a country (and a time) famous for its inscrutably confucian, beautifully handwritten, baroque bureaucratic traditions...
But for all of its faults, it is a country that I dearly love...and not only for having generously and graciously given me my formal medical education and degree...
I don't know how things are today, but the libretto was a one of a kind document that had each of my exams written in it, along with the date of the exam, my grade, and most importantly...the professor's signature...
All of this information was also recorded on computer sheets and signed by the professor (after signing the more personal and dramatic libretto)...
but in those earliest days of personal computers, each of the day's exam sheets were apparently meant to be entered into some university computer database that (as far as we students knew) may or may not have ever existed...
The bottom line was that if I hadn't made photocopies of each of the pages of my libretto, I couldn't have graduated until each of those computer sheets were found...
and I was told that the process could take months...
I was also immensely fortunate to have taken the advice of friends to make those simple photocopies before handing in that amazingly precious document...
Now as an educator, what I find so subversively and perversely important about this headline is the question of what is ultimately more important...?
The education (i.e. the educated student)...or the diploma?
In a world where greater and greater numbers of people are being given (or rather going in to debt) buying expensive educations...the number of fraudulent pieces of paper out there must be rather large...
Either that, or we're all being duped into spending literally thousands of dollars having our educational credentials examined, verified, and re-certified every time we make a move....
And so I suppose that we must have both...
The papers (along with the necessarily expensive certified paper sniffers) as well as those graduates who can readily demonstrate their true education...
But producing a bona fide piece of paper is not the same thing as demonstrating an education...!
Or is it?
Of course not...!
But unfortunately, here is compelling evidence for the dominance of the damn piece of paper...bona fide or not...
what an awful shame!
...and yet there but for the grace...
