Some further thoughts that I couldn’t squeeze into this week’s column on higher education.
It is amazing how many of the men and women now honored as
great Illinoisans managed to become so without benefit of formal instruction.
Lincoln apprenticed as a lawyer. Most lawyers did back then. Debate continues
about how good a background he had in what are usually delicately referred to
as “the finer points of law,” but he was capable enough. You might say, “Well,
Lincoln had no law school to go to.” True, but young ambitious people today
have no place except school to go to. Of the two, Lincoln’s dilemma is
the easier to overcome.
Take journalism. People used to learn how to be reporters by
being reporters. Eager cubs would hang around the office, from where editors
sent them out with pad and pencil whenever a horse fell down in the street or
someone reported their geranium stolen. The resulting write-up was critiqued,
often in instructively vulgar terms, by a sub-editor. (Henry Mencken’s Newspaper
Days recalls these about his career in Baltimore, and will make you wish you’d
been there.) Eventually the newbies learned to do it right.
I have made a
living at journalism (using the term broadly) for 40 years but I never studied
it. I learned by doing under the guidance of indulgent editors. When seeking
work, I offered as a credential not a college transcript or a resume but examples
of my previous pieces. Today I would no more be allowed in
a newsroom today than in a hospital operating room. You must have
a BA at least, with a major in — and I shudder to write
the word — “communications” that is often earned in colleges that also teach advertising and public relations and other
advanced propagandistic arts.
Reporters (they would never presume to call themselves journalists) tended to come from the upwardly mobile working class. Today they are middle class. The differences in their backgrounds shows in their preoccupations and those of their editors, who are usually promoted reporters. Read the newspapers of Springfield from any period up to the 1960s — I recommend it — and you will find them full of stories about life, not lifestyles.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2017.
