Page 119 - The Drucker Lectures

100 [ The Drucker Lectures

this is not automation. This is applying knowledge to the orga-
nization of the work.
We are beginning to shift the center of gravity to people who
work with knowledge. And don’t ask me: Is the tremendous ed-
ucational expansion of the century the cause, or is it the effect?
That’s the chicken-and-egg question, and I don’t think you can
answer it. But it is also clear that even in this country, where
manual labor has the highest esteem of any country in the world,
people who have sat on their rear ends for 12 or 16 years are not
going to get their hands dirty if they can help it.
This is something quite new. In the early 1900s, if you had
wiped out the educated people in any society, very few people
would have noticed it—very few. They were an ornament. It’s only
in the 1920s that the majority of American schoolteachers had
any training in teaching. The great majority before World War I
had finished high school, and that’s it. And then they shipped out
to Iowa and took over a one-room schoolhouse. And doctors and
lawyers in this country, up until the 1920s, by and large, did not
yet have to go to school—an apprenticeship was adequate.
This has changed drastically since. And so we have, for the
first time, large numbers of people who will make their living
putting knowledge to work. And what is perhaps equally unprec-
edented is that they work in organizations. As late as 1946, you
could not get a certificate as a professional engineer in the state of
New York, where that title had been invented. You could not get
it if you were employed. Engineers were still presumed to work
on their own. And in fact, in this country, only two companies
hired engineers before World War I—General Electric and the
telephone company. And nobody else did until the 1920s.
We lived up in Vermont during World War II and had an
excellent small community hospital there. It had no X-ray, no
emergency room, no physical therapy, no pathology—nothing.
One general practitioner came in Friday night and cut up the