Ron and Trav,

Do y'all think this is a general truth about a lot of things...not just fly fishing? I've talked to several of my elders about this...folks who understand education, training, and business performance...and they all have the same basic observation: a lot of "cookie-cutter" type superficial knowledge learned in classrooms or brief training sessions and not much real-world experience-based understanding of the how's and why's of their fields of endeavor. For example, yesterday I had a conversation with a guy with over 40 years of retail sporting goods experience about this very thing. He commented that virtually nobody in a sporting goods store today has anything more than a very superficial knowledge of their products, the sports they are used for, etc. and that the store managers rarely have any interest in sporting goods at all; but are guys/gals with MBA's who are only concerned with the bottom lines of spreadsheets and some basic principles of retail management they learned in a classroom in business school from someone else who learned them in some other business school and so on. He said it has been about 15 years since he has seen a sporting goods store manager who got into the business 10 years or so prior and worked his way up through the business because he had a love for sports and recreation, learning the products, people, vendors, reps, consumers, market trends, etc. of the business firsthand. He said when he got in the business, the standard employee discount was 50-70% so that employees would buy and use the products - thus learning all about them firsthand. Today, a 10% employee discount is considered a "benefit." And back then, a guy could work in retail sporting goods and raise a family (meagerly, but it could be done). Thus, he could stay in the business and a store could retain employees. He routinely got Christmas bonuses = an extra month's pay. Now, these stores can't even keep a college kid or high school grad for very long because they find better pay and benefits somewhere else. And the smart ones are hiring retirees on social security who only want part-time work at low pay and no benefits who look like they've been doing it forever and ought to know what they are talking about.

Again, this is just one example. And I chose it because it's one we can all identify with easily. I'm really not trying to pick on sporting goods stores. Pick a pharmacy. Pick a department store. Pick an auto mechanic's shop. Pick your local heating and cooling company. Look at your local schools! Most classroom teachers look like they should still be in school themselves. As soon as they can, they get a masters in administration and leave the classroom for one of those non-teaching school system jobs that outnumber classroom teacher jobs nowadays.

Seems to me we're suffering a general lack of experience-based wisdom throughout our society. Someone graduates from school having gone straight through their BS and MS and we call them an expert. And we elect a President who has never truly been in charge of a single thing before.

I think we've lost all appreciation for much beyond the superficial.