In the context of a discussion of the reliability of Wikipedia, Will Richardson paraphrases a librarian who has struggled to know how to evaluate the content of a web site. She said something like this:
I've been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don't really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not.
Whether she intended it or not, whether she even knows it or not, she has, I think, put her finger on one of the central failures of our education system. Adults, professionals, people who have completed their formal education and taken on their career roles, should be responsible -- it is useful to pull that word apart -- should be able to respond to the complexity they face as professionals, as citizens. They should be able to make judgments and do the work necessary to claim their own authority -- to become one who can speak as an author does, yes?, not remain one who unwittingly repeats the wisdom or nonsense propogated by others.
So if a ten-year professional librarian can find herself saying that she doesn't know where to begin -- by the way, good for her for having the nerve to say it -- then what does that say about her college training in librarianship, her college's general education program, her high school's advanced courses, and her profession's daily working standards? And do we have any reason to believe that her profession and education are much different than many others?
Responsibility, judgment, authority -- I don't know which one comes first -- core values of education and professionalism.