Perhaps I missed the point earlier with Matthew Crawford's major thesis. On one hand Crawford is definitely promoting the value of the practical arts, those careers for which a liberal arts college education is not a prerequisite. On the other hand, Crawford seems to be promoting a higher ideal of living that draws on the philosophical teachings of Aristotle. Crawford's main idea is to lay out a kind of road map to live the enriched life - and this map is not the same for everybody who takes it. Despite his warnings and cautionary tales of misery and misdirected goals, his sage advice in choosing a life for one's self will go largely unheeded.
The author has been fortunate enough to live in both "worlds" of the practical arts and liberal arts and gain the advantages of both. Crawford indeed is the proprietor of a small motorcycle repair shop, Shockoe Moto, just outside of Richmond, Virginia, but he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. I can't think of anyone in my circle of friends, acquaintances, or friends of friends, or acquaintances of acquaintances, who has this kind of unique background. Crawford is the poster child rara avis in the dictionary figurative sense.
My gut tells me that Crawford is authentic in his call for more fulfilling, thinking work for all. It seems the biggest mistake someone can make is to choose a path that is not fulfilling. Crawford quotes from Talbot Brewer to make a point about "finding a groove":
To take pleasure in an activity is to engage in that activity while being absorbed in it, where this absorption consists in single-minded and lively attention to whatever it is that seems to make the activity good or worth pursuing . . . If one were struck only by the instrumental value of the activity . . . one's evaluative attention would be directed not at the activity but at its expected results - that is, at something other than what one is doing. This sort of attention . . . absents us from our activity and renders it burdensome. (194)
From this it is clear: you find yourself almost "losing time" engaged in the pursuits you are absorbed in. "Work" can become a sort of leisure activity. However, if you are only doing what you do for the "instrumental value" (money?) - distraction and longing for something else creep in.
The message: Yes, everyone needs to "find their own beach" - but the metaphorical beach can be your work as well if its the right thing for you.
My car has a computer. It can do some amazing things like keep track of the tire pressure, do routine diagnostics of the exhaust system, remind me of when I need to have my oil changed, provide feedback on fuel efficiency, and even give my cabin separate passenger and driver "comfort zones." It does everything that drivers 30 years ago had to do themselves (except the comfort zone part - that's just a new feature on modern cars). Any of these aspects of the car most drivers would monitor themselves. For example, my father had a small booklet he kept in the car in which he kept detailed records of every fill-up of gas including price per gallon and mileage of the car and he would calculate out the fuel efficiency each time.
So it is for the mechanic as well. If the "check engine" indicator is lit, then a mechanic can plug into the car's computer and get a code or codes that caused the indicator to blink or shine vague and steady. Once the mechanic has the codes, he can look these up in to see what the problem is. This process may lead to the exact problem, or it may lead to a problem the computer senses from its pre-programmed monitor "brain." What is missing here is intuition, experience, and human judgement. A car computer cannot see, hear, smell, or feel the parts of the engine that may be suspect. An experienced master mechanic used to be able to sense these subtleties of the car by drawing on deep tactile knowledge of cars and how they run. Today's mechanics plug in and are taught to "fix by numbers."
This leads to Matthew Crawford's claim that we long to have a better sense of the world through handling and knowing tangible objects. That if we deal totally in abstractions that we have lost some (literal and figurative) sense of the world:
If thinking is bound up in action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it. And in fact this is the case: to really know shoelaces, you have to tie shoes. (164)
To really know something, to really experience something, you have to get your hands dirty . . . and like it . . . and then come back for more. If experiences are held at an arms-length abstraction, such as the details of my car either to me or my mechanic, then we can never really know. We leave this element of thinking to a computer to do for us. Sure not everyone wants to be an auto mechanic, but what about other elements in life?
Matt Crawford sees a world heading for an abyss of abstraction and dependency. He is calling for audiences to take a step back to figure things out by hand. Are we losing our grasp on the fast-changing world around us, happy to have the latest technology in hand that we become ever more dependent on? What happens when the internet goes down? What happens when my car won't start? What happens when we lose a sense of the concrete?
At Maine East we definitely cultivate a "college culture" among faculty and staff. During the week of the annual District 207 College Fair, faculty and staff are encouraged to wear clothes representing their alma mater or some other college or university. Same during the early college application week. Same every first Wednesday of every month. (Truth be told - you don't have to ask most teachers twice if they want to wear jeans and a sweatshirt to school!)
Of course, the rationale behind this promotion of college as the logical and best "next step" after high school is that we know some things about material success and its direct relationship to levels of education.
This is one proverbial "carrot on the stick" that provides a very significant economic reason for pursuing a college diploma, and, by doing so, more (materially) rewarding work.
Of course there is much more to college than earning a piece of paper that gives you entrance to interviews for well-paying jobs. I firmly believe in a liberal college education, that is an education that exposes the student to a world of humanities and possibilities, leads to an enriched life of lifelong learning, critical literacy, a humanistic outlook, a desire to serve others, and an appreciation for the fine arts. I hope both my sons go to college and receive these kinds of "bonus gifts."
As a teacher, I was particularly interested in what Matt Crawford had to say about promoting college as a post-secondary option:
So what advice should one give to a young person? If you have a natural bent for scholarship; if you are attracted to the most difficult books out of an urgent need, and can spare four years to devote yourself to them, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsman ship, going deep into the liberal arts and sciences. (53)
This aligns pretty closely with what I thought. The thing is, Crawford also warns against going to college for the wrong reasons:
But if this is not the case; if the thought of four more years sitting in a classroom makes your skin crawl, the good news is you don't have to go through the motions and jump through the hoops for the sake of making a decent living. (53)
In this section of the book, Crawford literally "goes to work" by recounting his experiences as a motorcycle mechanic and a knowledge worker at Information Access Company (now part of Gale/Cengage).
For Crawford, a "decent living" was something he expected after he earned his Masters Degree. He sought work that would put his mind to work in the knowledge sector as a writer of abstracts of professional journal articles. He describes his introduction to his work space at IAC in romantic terms:
As I was shown to my cubicle . . . I felt a real sense of being honored. They had made a place for me . . . It was my desk, where I would think my own thoughts . . . these thoughts would be my unique contribution to a common enterprise . . . (131)
This idealism would change for Crawford as reality set in - he found his work reduced to surreal isolation, reaching quotas, and a lack of quality control. His attitude toward the work became antagonistic and he became especially frustrated at not being able to see the fruit of his labor directly contributing to a greater good.
The motorcycle shop was a different matter. During his summers and also part-time when he was a student, Crawford would work as an apprentice mechanic. As Crawford took on more and more projects, especially on older models (like a 1983 Honda Magna v45) that required problem-solving skills and experience to diagnose problems and map a plan for repair, he found himself totally invested and committed to the final product. In the end, the motorcycle will either run well, run poorly, or not run at all. The proof and affirmation of his work was definitive and real. He saw within this professional work something lacking in the cubicle: creative satisfaction.
The so-called promise offered to the "knowledge worker" holding a college degree may lead to a new kind of assembly-line banality. Crawford's warning is at the heart of his message to those who may be looking for something else.
So . . . about those college plans . . .
This past summer I took on a home improvement project that I wasn't absolutely sure I would be completely successful in completing. My wife Conni ordered cork flooring to replace the dog-shredded "white" carpet that was in our family room.
Seemed easy enough as described on the internet video. And then I went to work and found a whole lot of problem-solving that I didn't expect at the outset. How do I level out from room to room uneven floor height? How do I cut around radiator pipe? What is the best way to leave holes in the floor to run television and internet cable through?
So what I thought might take a couple days tops took me a solid week of working straight through with several trips to the hardware store between. Thank you YouTube and Google Search for helping me through the project!
I've spent my career as a teacher of skills and ideas. As an educator, I don't necessarily produce anything tangible that you can wrap up and take home - my students do that. I guess I am in some ways one worker on a kind of "educational experience / skills development assembly line" that students go through. This is not a criticism of my work, nor may it be a popular metaphor to attach to schooling, but in some ways it is true. I get students at "Stage 10" in the 12-stage process and do "installations" of reading and writing skills that augment the "product" on the line.
I am intrigued by Matthew Crawford's thesis in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Crawford views the world and the world of work as a place increasingly dependent on ideas and intangible skills. The "product" of much of our work now appears as temporary words and figures on a computer screen - flashes of light meaningful only in the meaning we grant them. Crawford delves into the idea that there has been a movement away from the practical arts - actually he challenges the idea that so-called desk jobs are intrinsically more valuable than jobs in which you work with your hands: electrician, machinist, carpenter, mason, plumber, HVAC repair, mechanic.
"A repairman...puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on. His relationship to objects enacts a more solid sort of command, based on real understanding."
I've always admired those who are really able to accomplish something in a practical and permanent sense - the auto mechanic who is able to diagnose the issue with my car's brakes and rotors, the sewer repairman who installs an outdoor access pipe, the HVAC installer who makes sure I can heat and cool my house efficiently. It's not until I dabble with a more involved home-improvement project that I get the sense of pride in permanence that Crawford expounds upon. Even more intriguing is the sense that we are becoming less and less familiar with the objects we depend on, and even more dependent on those objects we don't understand. And by extension, we become more dependent on those who repair those objects we depend on. There's real value in the understanding that goes with the practical arts.
Here's an interview of Matthew Crawford talking about Shop Class as Soulcraft on The Colbert Report:
