"Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work" by Matthew B. Crawford

By sheer luck, since we don't have a TV, I caught the Colbert Report (probably a re-run) while visiting friends in CT this past weekend and author Crawford was a guest on the show. I was captivated by his simple premise as a philosopher / mechanic who, in his book, "Shop Class as Soulcrat: An Inquiry into the Value of Work", aims to destroy, "the pretensions of the high-prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one's hands." Also by sheer luck, I found this book yesterday on the "Speed Read" shelf at my local Concord Public Library (with 2 boys under 4, things just have to be speedy).

Here at the FBEA we often talk about the value of hard work and being a part of something measurably productive when we layout our long laundry list of things that public access working farms do for a community and individuals - adults and children. I've just started to read it and am really enjoying it - and not just becuase he has used the words "agrarians" and "chic" in the same paragraph.

I've found that women don't play a big role in his exploration which is interesting to me given the rate at which women especially are turning to farming and other trades/crafts historically the domains of men. Maybe I can track down the author and get him out to Powisset or Gaining Ground, or Coverdale or Picadilly farms to show him examples of the ladies fixing tractors, hauling, and hoeing.

Below are a few choice nuggets I have found to support and inspire the work of farm-based educators. Also below are links to the book on the publisher's website, the NY Times book review, and the Colbert interview. Enjoy.

Excerpts from "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work" by Matthew B. Crawford

Introduction, Page 3:
"In this book I would like to speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work."

Introduction, Page 8:
"What follows is an attempt to map the overlapping territories intimated by the phrases "meaningful work" and "self-reliance." Both ideals are tied to a struggle for individual agency, which I find to be at the very center of modern life. When we view our lives through the lens of this struggle, it brings certain experiences into sharper focus. We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.

Some people respond by learning to grow their own vegetables. There are even reports of people raising chickens on the rooftops of apartment buildings in New York City. These new agrarians say they get a deep satisfaction from recovering a more direct relationship to the food they eat. Others take up knitting, and find pride in wearing clothes they have made themselves. The home economics of our grandmothers is suddenly cutting-edge chic - why should this be?

With hard economic times looming, we want to become frugal. Frugality requires some measure of self-reliance - the ability to take care of your own stuff. But the new interest in self-reliance seems to have arisen before the specter of hard times. Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy."

Chapter 1: A Brief Case for the Useful Arts, P.11
"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." -Crawford cites, "A certain shop teacher whose name I have lost" for this wisdom.

Chapter 4: The Education of a Gearhead, P. 102
"This can be understood by analogy with our food choices: having a motor rebuilt would correspond roughly to the decision to buy food from a local farmer versus distant agribusiness. This is a practice the bohemian consumer already has in the cultural tool kit he uses, not only to construct his dissident self image but to give expression to his genuine public-spiritedness. If the regard that many people now have for the wider ramifications of their food choices could be brought to our relationships to our own automobiles, it would help sustain pockets of mindful labor."

Link to The Penguin Press webpage for Crawford's "Shop Class as Sou....

Link to NY Times Book review of "Shop Class as Soulcraft

Link to Author interview with Steve Colbert