One of the all-time great movies, and one of my all-time favorites, is “The Wizard of Oz.” In the tear-inducing final scene, shortly before Dorothy is returned home, the Wizard addresses the self-assumed shortcomings of her companions.
To the Scarecrow, he says: “Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of deep learning where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma!”
The Wizard hands a scroll in a ribbon to the Scarecrow, who immediately pontificates with a wide, proud grin, “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.”
As a young math student, I was always bothered by this scene. The equation that the Scarecrow recites is wrong. It would have been easy to consult any mathematician, or even high school math student, to get a correct and similarly impressive-sounding statement. It bothered me for years, slightly tarnishing an otherwise perfect gem of a movie.
But recently, I’ve come to see it as perhaps prophetic.
Is it possible that its screenwriters or directors did this on purpose? Could the message be not that the Scarecrow is intelligent but that university graduates are not? Could it be that a degree really has no meaning, that degreed men are no more deep thinkers and no less mistake-prone than others? In the 1930s, that message was probably understood easily by moviegoers. But that message is lost today.
This modern reliance on credentials, while ignoring actual ability, is what I call the Scarecrow Effect. I noticed it perhaps first when I graduated with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.
I had mixed feelings about my education. I had met with some great minds among professors and students, but many of my classes lacked any personal interaction. Some professors were excellent at research but obviously had no interest, or skill, at teaching.
However, when I left Stanford and looked for a job, interviewers rarely inquired about much beyond my degree from Stanford. Even years later, when I tell people I attended Stanford, their reaction is to remark on how impressed they are, without asking what I’ve done or accomplished in the nearly 40 years since then. My degree was all that mattered.
This is the Scarecrow Effect.
This is the Scarecrow Effect.
Then-University of California President Janet Napolitano assembled a blue-ribbon panel of leading experts to look into bias of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which has been used for decades as a factor in college admissions. The panel came back this year with a report, unanimously agreed upon by the panel, that the test wasn’t biased—it actually increased minority enrollment and was highly correlated with success in college.
This is the Scarecrow Effect.
The thinking goes that by handing these students a law degree, these schools have fulfilled their purpose regardless of whether those students actually know and understand the law. Will the same be true soon of doctors? As you go under on the operating table, will you hear the surgeon say, “I never saw this thing before, but I have a medical degree, so I’ll figure it out”?
This is the danger of the Scarecrow Effect.
Along the theme of the Scarecrow Effect, many schools like to post banners of the following quote from Albert Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Misunderstanding the phrase, and taking it out of context, many teachers use it to justify the Scarecrow Effect, as if children, and adults, don’t need to learn things, they just need to imagine things.
Einstein had as much knowledge of our world as any scientist at the time. He was speaking not to today’s society, but to people in his time that took learning seriously. The people of his time accepted knowledge as critical to discovery, something we seem to have forgotten. He followed his statement with the explanation, “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”
It’s time for reasonable people to pull back the curtain and expose the fraud behind the Scarecrow Effect. Our civilization needs skilled, competent workers in all fields, from construction to auto mechanics to engineering to medicine. People need real knowledge to excel in their careers and to be functioning citizens of our society. Unqualified, unknowledgeable people need to fail, despite the damage to their self-esteem.
It’s time for parents, teachers, and employers to encourage our children to learn actual skills and obtain actual knowledge, and not worry just about some title or piece of paper.
