Education has acquired a kind of snob(诌上骄下的势利鬼) value in modern times. We are no longer content to be honest craftsmen(工匠), skilled at our work through years of patient practice. Nowadays if we want promotion in even the humblest(卑微的) job, we have to obtain a certificate or a diploma first. We may know that we would be better at the job than the man with the paper qualifications, but our experience and practical skills are often regarded as relatively unimportant. 'Johnson would have been manager by now if he'd taken the trouble to get a degree,' his colleagues say, 'he's a clever man. He could have done anything if he'd had a proper education.' I wonder if, as time goes on, we shall discover that many people, whose practical experience and ability would have been enormously useful to their employers, have been rejected form. hire or promotion on the grounds that they were insufficiently qualified. Would it not be better to allow people to become expert in the way most suited to them, rather than oblige them to follow a set course of instruction which may offer no opportunity for them to develop skills in which they would have become expert if left it to themselves? By the first sentence in Para.1, the writer probably means ______.