Thread: Education

It's worth noting (as I have mentioned before), that all Professors in the original have the title -hakase, which suggests at least a doctorate. To be a professor though, one has to be a faculty member at the university.

In the games, you're told you qualify to be a professor if you fill up a certain number on your dex. Maybe it's a short form of saying that the professor wants you to go into that field, but if so, it's not elaborated on.

What about Gary, then?

He just decided after Johto that he would be a professor. And after a bit more journeying, he ended up on Seda Island where his Old Amber just happened to match the fossilised egg they had. He's certainly caught lots of Pokémon, but I don't think that that is what made him a professor.

Incidently, Professor Oak then buys him "a microscope, some rare collector's journals, books, and stuff like that."

We all know how Prof. Ivy got her title. XD (see Pokemopolis)

It is generally accepted that to be a pokemon professor, you must know a whole lot about pokemon. Far more than ordinary people might know. It is clearly a very scientific field, specifically a zoological-like field (Pokology? o.o). I'm not entirely sure if it's like the zoology on this planet, where you would have to know anatomy and all that. The dex even mentions Oddish having a scientific name (Oddium wanderus), which means there is some form of taxonomy. (It would be interesting to know how this classification system works, and I have some theories if you would like to hear them)

I still think there is an optional higher education system in place. Either that, or the pokemon professors became so after a lot of years doing fieldwork and studying pokemon until they could submit a paper of their findings that is unique. The question is who evaluates these papers. It would have to be a set of already established professors that have senority, which would normally be found at a university. It has been shown, however, that Professor Oak at least does lectures for pokemon schools and generally everyone praises him for being at the very top of the pokemon research field. Professor Elm studies pokemon evolution and with a little help discovered the secrets of the pokemon egg. Professor Birch likes to get to know pokemon on a personal level, going out into the field to observe them for himself. I'm not sure if we will ever truly know how one becomes a pokemon professor, but I imagine it is a very involved process. There are a lot of us here that could probably qualify with all we know of pokemon. I would like it myself, although I got tired of college level chemistry, and I don't even want to know what organic chemistry involves. Even my Invertebrates course made me a bit squeamish. (I was a Biological Science major) I probably don't know how to be objective enough anyway.

That is a very good question, and I haven't thought a lot about it before. I had never thought that they must earn a PhD, it had always seemed to me that they had become Pokemon professors self-evidently, just had achieved recognition with their actions and research. As far as scientific standards of evaluation... Well, doesn't Max or Tracy in the anime at some point comment about how they read his recent paper in some publication? So yeah, I'd think that there are scientific periodicals like "Science" and "Nature" over here, and probably they just have the same basic scientific standards over here, like with full disclosure and moral practices and hypotheses and experimental/dependent variables, and just submit that along with their commentary, and the people who run those magazines or help run them just take a look at it, makes sure it's not completely faulty, and then print it, and then that publication is distributed and people read it. Also, they could communicate over e-mail to a degree, or maybe with video conferences to some degree, and possibly scientists/professor-types could have conventions of sorts. I don't know. =)

I would think that if you became a trainer you wouldn't need an education, so why bother