Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [11]
Given the intrinsic richness of manual work—cognitively, socially, and in its broader psychic appeal—the question becomes why it has suffered such a devaluation as a component of education. The economic rationale so often offered, namely, that manual work is somehow going to disappear, is questionable if not preposterous, so it is in the murky realm of culture that we must look to understand these things. Here a bit of history can help; a glance at the origins of shop class early in the twentieth century reveals cultural currents that continue to swirl around us.
Art, Crafts, and the Assembly Line
Early in the twentieth century, when Teddy Roosevelt preached the strenuous life and elites worried about their state of “over-civilized” spiritual decay, the project of getting back in touch with “real life” took various forms. One was romantic fantasy about the premodern craftsman. This was understandable given changes in the world of work at the turn of the century, a time when the bureaucratization of economic life was rapidly increasing the number of paper shufflers. As T. J. Jackson Lears explains in his history of the Progressive era, No Place of Grace, the tangible elements of craft were appealing as an antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy, and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the professional classes.
The Arts and Crafts movement thus fit easily with the new therapeutic ethic of self-regeneration. Depleted from his work-week in the corporate world, the office worker repaired to his basement workshop to putter about and tinker, refreshing himself for the following week. As Lears writes, “toward the end of the nineteenth century, many beneficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims.”14 Various forms of antimodernism gained wide currency in the middle and upper classes, including the ethic of craftsmanship. Some Arts and Crafts enthusiasts conceived their task to be evangelizing good taste as embodied in the works of craft, as against machine-age vulgarity. Cultivating an appreciation for objets d’art was thus a form of protest against modernity, with a view to providing a livelihood to dissident craftsmen. But it dovetailed with, and gave a higher urgency to, the nascent culture of luxury consumption. As Lears tells the story, the great irony is that anti-modernist sentiments of aesthetic revolt against the machine paved the way for certain unattractive features of late-modern culture: therapeutic self-absorption and the hankering after “authenticity,” precisely those psychic hooks now relied upon by advertisers. Such spiritualized, symbolic modes of craft practice and craft consumption represented a kind of compensation for, and therefore an accommodation to, new modes of routinized, bureaucratic work.
But not everyone worked in an office. Indeed, there was class conflict brewing, with unassimilated immigrants accumulating in America’s eastern cities and serious labor violence in Chicago and elsewhere. To the upper classes of those same cities, enamored of the craft ideal, the possibility presented itself that the laboring classes might remain satisfied with their material lot if they found joy in their labor. Shop class could serve to put the proper spin on manual work. Any work, it was posited, could be “artful” if done in the proper spirit. Somehow a movement that had started with reverence for the craftsman now offered an apologetic for factory work. As Lears writes, “By shifting their attention from the conditions of labor to the laborer’s frame of mind, craft ideologues could acclaim the value of any work, however monotonous.”15
The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for