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October 2, 2006

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Matthew C Crawford's essay in The New Atlantis, Shop Class as Soulcraft, captures my view on a lot of issues. My dad's an engineer and my mom's a math teacher.

Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.”

We could hardly navigate the garage at times for all the tools, and we could hardly navigate our rooms at times for all the legos. Lego recently announced plans to lay off 1,200 workers and move production to Mexico. From one perspective, this indicates the upward growth of Mexico, and that's good, but it also concerns me that the people around me, Americans, are losing even more of this:

I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

We know the effects of this self-esteem that educators impart are limited, but I know, from my own experience, that the satisfaction of proven agency and competence lasts far longer, almost as long as the effect of winning a race. And so it goes: the easier something is to come by, the less it is valued. An interesting sidenote, is that I have found statistical work to be relatively closer to craftsmanship than pure academic achievement or scholastic accolades. Finding definitive answers to interesting questions through the analysis of data changes the world. Much like craftsmanship, it has social currency. Similarly, leading a group to success in an interesting, significant problem, carries social currency.

In The Mind at Work, Mike Rose provides “cognitive biographies” of several trades, and depicts the learning process in a wood shop class. He writes that “our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission.... It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain.”

So to, it has seemed to me that teachers are more interested in what the finished student looks like and what influence they perhaps had on the product, and little attention is paid to the vast majority of the work and thought that went into the product, that was mainly the student's effort and thinking. Who has measured what students do to make themselves? How do they make the decisions that lead them to certain methods and tools, and deter them from others? How does the student make himself into a craftsman?

Of course, surgery is perhaps the highest practical amalgem of study and apprenticeship,

Mike Rose writes that in the practice of surgery, “dichotomies such as concrete versus abstract and technique versus reflection break down in practice. The surgeon’s judgment is simultaneously technical and deliberative, and that mix is the source of its power.” This could be said of any manual skill that is diagnostic, including motorcycle repair. You come up with an imagined train of causes for manifest symptoms and judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a stock mental library, not of natural kinds or structures, like that of the surgeon, but rather the functional kinds of an internal combustion engine, their various interpretations by different manufacturers, and their proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire. If the motorcycle is thirty years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business twenty years ago, its proclivities are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred Cousins in Chicago, had such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I could offer him in exchange was regular shipments of obscure European beer.

And, finally, the guiding light:

So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

Posted by Niels Olson at October 2, 2006 9:05 AM

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