THE PROFESSIONS   RESPONSE FORM Topic Index
  1. The professions are designed to be closed shops (they are as bad as unions) that can only be joined if one comes from the right background. One has to have been to university and to have obtained a degree to be eligible to join them.
  2. All the professions believe they are elites who should be paid loads of money. Less able people must be prevented from taking a share of the cake and adversely affecting the professionals' earning power, they must be kept out, they can scratch around for what they can find in the dirt.
  3. The professions seek to humiliate and therefore discourage less able aspirants from attempting to become members.
  4. Secondary school children should be able to get some sort of membership of the professions so that they can find out what they are all about and make career decisions.
  5. Professions are very similar to unions, their main preoccupation is to raise the status and income of their members with little regard to whether that is justified.
  6. The professions try to pull the wool over outsider's eyes. They try to dupe the rest of us into believing that their members do much more difficult work than is actually the case, in order to justify excessive salaries. They do this principally by insisting that their members undergo training and education that is unnecessary and not cost effective. They must be supervised much more closely to stop this fraudulent waste.
  7. The professions are sordid, corrupt clubs whose members seek to improve their own position at everybody else's expense. They work with the education system to ensure as far as possible that people from the "wrong" background are excluded. They are another tool by which those who consider themselves to be superior maintain their advantage. Aspiring members have to jump through the hoops the professions erect to try to impede and exclude them.
  8. They mustn't just serve the top practitioners of a profession, they must serve all levels and ensure that there is always a path to the top from any other level for anybody of any age with sufficient ability to take it.
  9. It must be ensured that their activities are always in the best interests of the population at large, ie. they must be regulated.
  10. The principal function of the professions is to help their members to keep abreast of developments in their field and to ensure there are avenues via which all members can progress from the bottom to the top. They should probably provide alternative routes to those provided by universities. Their second most important function is to ensure that their members are not exploited by employers. They should probably also help their members to find suitable employment.