Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [4]
The time is ripe to dwell on this unease rather than dismiss it. The scope of the economic crisis is still uncertain as I write this, but it appears to be deepening. We are experiencing a genuine crisis of confidence in our most prestigious institutions and professions. This presents an opportunity to reconsider some basic assumptions. The question of what a good job looks like—of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored—is more open now than it has been for a long time. Wall Street in particular has lost its luster as a destination for smart and ambitious young people. Out of the current confusion of ideals and confounding of career hopes, a calm recognition may yet emerge that productive labor is the foundation of all prosperity. The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people’s work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, “Let me make myself useful.”
Back to basics, then. The cover is cracked. It is time to rip it off, look directly at the inner workings, and begin to fix things for ourselves.
1
A Brief Case for the Useful Arts
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 CERTAIN SHOP TEACHER WHOSE NAME I HAVE LOST
‾om Hull teaches welding, machine shop, auto shop, sheet metal work, and computer-aided drafting at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon. He is also president of the Technology Educators of Oregon. Asked about the current state of his profession, he says a lot of schools shut down their shop class programs in the 1990s, when there was a big push for computer literacy. To pay for the new computers, electives were cut. Shop was especially attractive as a target: it is expensive and potentially dangerous. Further, as Hull says, “you can’t shove fifty students at a time into a shop class, like you can a PE class.” In California, three-quarters of high school shop programs have disappeared since the early 1980s, according to the California Industrial and Technology Education Association.1 There are efforts in North Carolina, Florida, and California to revive shop, but finding people competent to teach it has become difficult. “We have a generation of students that can answer questions on standardized tests, know factoids, but they can’t do anything,” according to Jim Aschwanden, executive director of the California Agricultural Teachers’ Association.2
Meanwhile, people in the trades are constantly howling about their inability to find workers. The slack has been taken up to some extent by community colleges that offer shop class. Tom Thompson, of Oregon’s Department of Education, says there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that one of the fastest-growing segments of the student body at community colleges is people who already have a four-year degree and return to get a marketable trade skill. There are also for-profit schools such as Universal Technical Institute and Wyoming Technical Institute that draw students from around the country. Both graduate about 95 percent of their students, and about 98 percent of those who graduate get jobs in their first year after finishing.
Hull sends out a quarterly newsletter to the graduates of his shop programs. It is like a nineteenth-century almanac, a combination of useful information and intellectual inquiry, as well as examples of human uplift. The newsletter includes shop tips (for example, clever ways to clamp an irregularly shaped object in preparation for welding), book reviews, digressions on aesthetics, and success stories in which he profiles the careers of his former students. A recent issue featured