book: Shop Class as Soulcraft

Last weekend, the NY Times Magazine included a short excerpt from a terrific new book by Matthew Crawford, a motorcycle mechanic with a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
addresses issues of craft and work that will be important and thought-provoking to anyone interested in the philosophies behind the Arts & Crafts movement, and I look forward to getting my copy as soon as my local bookshop has it in stock.

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s
as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The
imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it
to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in
which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a
pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with,
such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally,
now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog
our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had
no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and
emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such
sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring
power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as
well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be
the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes
with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for
work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This
seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling
economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that
repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current
recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they
have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are
also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information
technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades
— plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers.
The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial
distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more
or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered
over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The
latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to
distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over
the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in
India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t
really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic
about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some
people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their
own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning
to build things or fix things. One shop teacher
suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning
environments for our children that they know to be contrived and
undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the
opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and
distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A
gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to
accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not
self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there
is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a
series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there
is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their
natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I
taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set
up a Ritalin
fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is
naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then
indefinitely at work.