This week I was driving one of my kids when the conversation turned to the difference between having an education, and having a credential.
By an education I mean a wide range of knowledge and the ability to think critically about what you learn. By a credential I mean something that is supposed to show your education, such as a university degree.
These two things are often synonymous, just not always. Some who lack credentials are self-educated. Some with credentials do not seem to know much or think critically. Most of us are somewhere on a spectrum, with differing levels of knowledge and credentials depending on the context.
I was glad this topic came up, because a lot of American life plays out along the fault line between the one thing and the other. People will identify more with one side, or refuse to listen to people on the other side. This is true in 2024, and it’s absolutely true in each of the nineteenth-century histories I have researched and written. When you look at the history first it becomes easier to see and understand that fault line today.
Differ We Must tells the story of Abraham Lincoln, who had less than a year of formal schooling. Lincoln read every book he could find as a youth—and while the books available on the Indiana frontier were not always good, he also studied people and human nature. Eventually he read law and persuaded a judge he was qualified to be a lawyer.
In later life, when he rose to power, Lincoln was always conscious of his lack of schooling—but he did not hide it, instead using it to connect with voters, many of whom were strivers like himself.
My book Jacksonland tells of Andrew Jackson, a democratic leader and man of the people. Today, some find it baffling that he was a hero of the common man, because he was also a very rich landowner and slaveowner. It would be easy to attribute this mystery solely to race—he appealed to the common white farmer or tradesman, who either shared his racism or didn’t think about Black people much at all—but that is only part of the answer. The rest of the answer lies in the fault line between an education and a credential.
Born poor and orphaned young, Jackson fought his way up in the world, though he lacked the credential that would matter most in his day—an elite or aristocratic family, the kind that would expose him to books, schooling, travel and cultural refinement. Jackson’s supporters not only trumpeted this fact but made it central to the ideology of the Democratic Party that he founded. The pro-Jackson propagandist Duff Green wrote in favor of “natural equality, and breaking down the contrivances of the old world to maintain and perpetuate distinctions in society.” Jackson personified the idea that a man could be qualified as a leader even if he lacked a title. (His admirers also insisted he was cultured and refined, despite his tendency to rage at his critics and a history of gunfights and duels.)
John Charles Frémont, a principal character of Imperfect Union, also lacked credentials. His mother was a fallen aristocrat; John was the child of her affair. Illegitimacy was considered far more of a horror and disgrace in his time than in ours, and his father died when John was young. He was expelled from school—then taught himself the skills he would need for a life as a solider and mapmaker. He learned celestial navigation from a book that was in Dutch, which he couldn’t read; he was able to figure out the numbers. Imperfect Union adds:
His qualifications came from life experience rather than formal training. This distinguished him from army officers who had graduated from the military academy at West Point, where cadets were forced to apply themselves in class, master the science of war, and generally grow up. West Pointers were early participants in the national trend of professionalization, which lawyers, physicians, engineers, scientists, educators, and others would eventually follow: raising formal standards, demanding specific credentials, and excluding those who did not measure up. John Frémont represented a different tradition: that of the intrepid amateur who found out how much he could get away with.
Frémont eventually suffered from his lack of formal training. As a solider he was erratic, disobedient and undisciplined. West Point trained offers to care for men under their command; Frémont sometimes disregarded the welfare of his. Likewise, Andrew Jackson might have seen some benefit from an ethics class, had one been available to him during his youth in the late 1700’s. Given a choice, Lincoln surely would have preferred a few extra years of schooling to his youth spent mainly wielding an axe.
But each of these characters also accomplished a lot in their lives, frequently by leaning on their own insights, and often by highlighting their lack of credentials. In America, the absence of formal training can itself be used as a credential—a sign of authenticity.
People also understand that a formal credential may be used as a barrier, limiting competition by ensuring that only a privileged few will be considered for elite jobs. In recent years the state of Maryland recognized this by removing four-year college degree requirements from many state jobs. In some cases a degree didn’t seem necessary, and merely limited opportunity.
The divide between credentials and education is evident in our political debates. Many people have lost faith in experts, the people with credentials. In some cases the experts earned disdain by asserting more certainty than they really had. (During the pandemic, it now seems, the experts were right about vaccines, wrong about closing schools for so long, and both right and wrong at different times about masking.) In other cases, ordinary citizens have become unmoored from reality by “doing their own research” and failing to think critically about what they learn.
This divide is also evident in the narratives of both major party presidential candidates. One might see Joe Biden as the candidate of the experts and technocrats, and Donald Trump as the candidate of the people who do their own research.
At the same time, one might take note that Donald Trump came from a wealthy background and boasted of an elite education. Joe Biden attended a public university and constantly reminds people of his working-class background.
How you view them may depend, in part, on where you place yourself on the spectrum between the educated and the credentialed.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my book of the same name. My writing about the past constantly adds to my understanding of the present; and links to my three nineteenth-century histories follow.
Differ We Must at my local bookstore
As a freshman in college, I babysat for a grad student couple who had a plaque in their home, perhaps a reminder if their goal in grad school: “Thermometers are not the only dumb things graduated with degrees.”
In reporting on career & technical education and reading work of other journalists in the Institute for Citizens & Scholars Higher Education Media Fellowship program over the past few years, I've increased my understanding (and, I hope, helped increase others') of the type of credential that in many cases bridges the gap you describe: the plethora of short-term credentials and certificates that can be earned and put to immediate career use in such areas as information systems, industrial maintenance, medical technician, welding, etc. These are not elitist credentials, but the opposite: certificates of specialized knowledge that qualify one for work in a field. They signal "professionalization" but without the suggestion of class distinction. It's education oriented toward getting work done, and it can be pursued, if one wishes, alongside more esoteric academic pursuits like my own impractical yet continually meaningful 4-year degree in poetry writing (with minors in theater and French!).