An electrical engineer who cannot fix a bulb is not merely a joke. It is a small, absurd window into a much larger civilisational fraud: the modern degree often certifies symbolic knowledge, not functional competence.
This does not mean engineering is useless. An electrical engineer may understand circuits, power systems, electromagnetism, load calculations, transmission losses, safety standards, and industrial design at a level far beyond the ordinary electrician. But the fact remains: a degree can qualify someone to discuss electricity while leaving them unable, unlicensed, or untrained to perform a simple domestic repair. That contradiction is not accidental. It is the fossil of an old class system still hiding inside modern education. It is a reminder of feudalism lords who had titles without real work.
The modern university descends largely from the medieval European university, where education was not designed primarily to create practical workers. It was designed to produce clerics, lawyers, administrators, theologians, physicians, and intellectual elites. The early Western university at Bologna became famous for canon and civil law, while Paris became known for theology. These were institutions of status, language, doctrine, and authority, not workshops of ordinary practical skill. The goal was classism not real skills.
The old curriculum makes the point brutally clear. The medieval “liberal arts” were grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. Britannica defines liberal arts as general intellectual training in contrast to professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. In other words, from the beginning, high education was built around the mind that commands, speaks, classifies, argues, and administers, while practical labour was pushed into guilds, apprenticeships, and lower-status occupations. The poor and lower class learnt practical skills while the elite learnt theoretical skills.
That is the root of the disease: the split between the hand and the head. The class system of inequality.
The hand became labour.
The head became status.
The worker learned by doing. The gentleman learned by talking about doing.
This split is feudal in spirit. In a feudal order, the ruling class does not prove itself by repairing roofs, forging tools, ploughing soil, stitching clothes, or fixing machines. It proves itself through manners, language, lineage, theology, law, and command. The degree inherited this aristocratic psychology. It became a modern parchment of superiority, a secular coat of arms. The university replaced the castle, the lecture hall replaced the court, and the credential replaced noble blood.
That is why societies often treat a mediocre degree-holder as more respectable than an exceptional technician. A plumber who prevents a building from flooding may be socially ranked below a graduate who writes sterile reports no one reads. A mechanic who understands machines through his hands may be dismissed as “blue collar,” while a management graduate who has never built anything may be treated as leadership material. This is not meritocracy. It is class theatre with institutional furniture.
Colonialism sharpened the blade further. In British India, Macaulay’s 1835 education policy elevated English education and a curriculum based on English models over Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and vernacular traditions. The colonial purpose was not mass liberation through practical mastery. It was to produce a class of intermediaries who could serve the administrative machinery of empire.
That colonial model rewarded mimicry over making. It rewarded clerical fluency over local competence. It taught the colonised subject to seek dignity through the language, categories, and certifications of the ruler. The degree became not only a mark of education, but a passport out of humiliation. It told the colonised: escape manual labour, escape your village, escape your language, escape your father’s trade, become respectable by becoming institutionally legible to power.
This is where the system becomes racial as well as class-based. The point is not that mathematics, engineering, medicine, or law are inherently racist. That would be intellectually lazy. The point is sharper: many institutions that distributed prestige, credentials, and access were historically embedded in racial hierarchies. In the United States, Black people were separated from white people by law and private action across public life, including schools, and the “separate but equal” doctrine was not overturned in public education until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Historically Black Colleges and Universities emerged because, under legally sanctioned segregation, admission of Black students to white higher education institutions was uncommon. That fact alone destroys the childish myth that degrees floated above society as pure measures of ability. They were distributed through systems already contaminated by race, class, wealth, gender, and power.
The degree therefore became a gatekeeping device. It did two things at once. First, it gave real training to some people in some fields. Second, it converted social privilege into institutional legitimacy. The wealthy could afford time, tuition, polish, language, networks, and unpaid internships. The poor were pushed towards vocational routes, early earning, and manual competence, then told they lacked prestige because they lacked degrees.
This is credentialism: the use of certificates as social filters. It is not merely about knowledge. It is about controlled entry into status groups. The credential says: you may now enter the room. Not necessarily because you are competent, but because you have passed through the approved ritual.
The modern economy still worships that ritual. A person may spend three or four years studying abstract theory, graduate with debt, and still require extensive training before being useful. Meanwhile, someone who has worked on real machinery, real customers, real emergencies, and real constraints for four years may be treated as “less educated.” This is civilisational stupidity dressed in academic robes.
The vocational route exposes the hypocrisy. OECD data shows that learners from less advantaged social backgrounds tend to be over-represented in vocational programmes, while students with at least one tertiary-educated parent are more represented in general academic programmes. Vocational education is not naturally inferior. It is made socially inferior because elites hoard symbolic education and leave practical education to those who must earn earlier.
This is why the electrician can fix the bulb and the electrical engineer may not. The electrician has been trained inside reality: tools, wiring, faults, standards, risk, and immediate consequence. The engineer has often been trained inside abstraction: diagrams, equations, systems, models, and exams. Both forms of knowledge matter. But only one is usually granted elite social prestige.
The tragedy is that genuine civilisation requires both.
Theory without practice becomes sterile.
Practice without theory can become narrow.
The engineer should understand the system. The electrician should understand the installation. The best societies do not worship one and degrade the other. They build ladders between them. They allow the technician to become an engineer without social humiliation. They force the engineer to touch tools before pretending to command systems.
A serious education system would abolish the snobbery between academic and practical intelligence. A law student should spend time in courts, tribunals, legal aid centres, police stations, tax offices, and client interviews. A business student should run actual sales campaigns, manage cash flow, deal with angry customers, and make payroll. An engineering student should wire, solder, repair, install, test, and fail under supervision. A medical student should not merely memorise anatomy, but learn the human consequences of delay, cost, fear, and system failure.
The degree should not be destroyed. That is a crude conclusion. Some fields require deep theoretical architecture. You do not want bridges designed by guesswork, drugs developed by instinct, or aircraft engineered by folk wisdom. But the degree must be dethroned. It must stop pretending that theoretical certification equals competence.
A real degree should have four components:
1. Theory, because abstraction allows scale.
2. Practice, because reality humiliates bad theory.
3. Apprenticeship, because competence is transmitted through disciplined imitation.
4. Ethics, because knowledge without responsibility becomes predatory.
The existing system often gives us the first and neglects the other three. That is how societies manufacture articulate incompetents: people who can explain systems they cannot operate, critique industries they have never entered, and manage workers whose work they secretly do not understand.
The real scandal is not that an electrical engineer may be unable to fix a bulb. The real scandal is that society may still rank him above the person who can.
That ranking is the ghost of feudalism.
That ranking is the residue of colonial administration.
That ranking is the afterlife of racial and class exclusion.
That ranking is why education so often produces status without skill, vocabulary without judgment, and confidence without competence.
The future belongs to systems that reunite the hand and the mind. The engineer must recover the dignity of tools. The technician must receive the dignity of theory. The university must stop behaving like a cathedral of certificates and start behaving like a forge of competence.
Until then, the degree will remain what it has too often been: not proof that a person can do the work, but proof that society has authorised them to speak above those who can.
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