Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [83]
Notes
1: A Brief Case for the Useful Arts
1 As reported by the Associated Press at CNN.com on October 2, 2006: “Rebuilding Shop Classes in U.S. High Schools.”
2 Ibid.
3 My circumstances were a bit unusual—I lived in a large commune from age nine to fifteen. Because the group picked up and moved every six months, there was constant renovation work on whatever dilapidated hotel we currently occupied. The electrical crew needed somebody small to fit into tight crawl spaces and drafted me. I mention this only because the reader may wonder why I was working rather than attending school.
4 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 27.
5 In fact, I think residential electrical work must be the least demanding of the building arts, in terms of the skill involved. Carpenters and plumbers both have to make rigid elements fit together just right, whereas residential wiring is encased in sheathing that is flexible. Installation goes very fast. No doubt one reason for the high wages of electricians is that people are afraid of electricity, and the stakes are indeed high if it isn’t done right. But getting it right isn’t that hard. So I am perfectly happy to concede the term “craft” to those who would reserve it for more demanding work, if they will allow it to include the bending of rigid conduit.
6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 95.
7 These features of narcissism were pointed out by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (1979).
8 In her review of Benjamin Barber’s book Consumed, Josie Appleton writes, “It is not so much that we have an ethic of consumption, but that—by default—it remains as one of the few meaningful experiences in our lives. There is a tangibility and satisfaction to buying—to picking out a new shirt or a new album and taking it home—that means that shopping remains for individuals a confirmation of their power to make things happen in the world. The power of consumption has been usefully theorised by the Marxist sociologist Georg Simmel. In The Philosophy of Money, he looks at how buying an object is an act of individual subjectivity, the person stamping himself on a thing and claiming his right to its exclusive enjoyment. Simmel cited the example of a friend he knew who would buy beautiful things, not to use them, but to ‘give an active expression to his liking of the things, to let them pass through his hands and, in so doing, to set the stamp of his personality upon them.’ Shopping remains a way in which our choices have a tangible effect, in which we can make something in our lives new and different. It also becomes the primary way in which people can enjoy the creativity and efforts of others, even if this is done unconsciously, without knowing who made something or how” (“The Cultural Contradictions of Consumerism”; available at www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5026).
9 Gorgias, 465a.
10 Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. xiii.
11 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, 316a5-9.
12 Mike Eisenberg and Ann Nishioka Eisenberg, “Shop Class for the Next Millennium: Education Through Computer-Enriched Handicrafts,” Journal of Interactive Media in Education 98 (October 14, 1998).
13 Rose, The Mind at Work, pp. 156-7.
14 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xv.
15 Ibid., p. 76.
16 Robert Franklin Hoxie, Scientific Management and Labor (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1918), pp.