Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - A Brief Case for the Useful Arts
Chapter 2 - The Separation of Thinking from Doing
Chapter 3 - To Be Master of One’s Own Stuff
Chapter 4 - The Education of a Gearhead
Chapter 5 - The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional
Chapter 6 - The Contradictions of the Cubicle
Chapter 7 - Thinking as Doing
Chapter 8 - Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement
Concluding Remarks on Solidarity and Self-Reliance
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
THE PENGUIN PRESS
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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
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Copyright © Matthew B. Crawford, 2009
All rights reserved
Line drawings by Thomas van Auken
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crawford, Matthew B.
Shop class as soulcraft : an inquiry into the value of work / by Matthew B. Crawford.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-05729-2
1. Work. I. Title.
HD4824.C72 2009
331—dc22
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For my girls,
the whole happy troupe
B, G & J
And in loving memory of my father,
Frank S. Crawford, Jr.
Introduction
Ayone looking 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 much of it once resided in schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. Most of this stuff has been kicking around the secondhand market for about fifteen years; it was in the 1990s that shop class started to become a thing of the past, as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.”
The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit. And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering many of the devices we depend on every day unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together