The Work With Your Hands Version
I never worked in fast food or as a clerk in retail but I spent many years working with my hands. I did this first in my dad’s construction business, then in my own small plaster/stucco business, and finally as a wall covering contractor. The last gig went on for almost 10 years until I reached my early 30’s. I was surrounded with talent, some of it world class, and I sought some of them out as mentors and coaches. One of them was Larry Spitler, an insanely great wall covering installer who traveled all over the country putting together teams that did installations on huge Las Vegas Hotels, commercial buildings, and high end homes. Once he came and helped me install a 300 dollar per roll hand screened silk from Thailand.
The reality was that I seemed to inherit almost none of the aptitude for the environment I was planted in although it seemed so rich with opportunity. I left working with my hands in 1991 and never looked back. One thing I learned is there is abundant opportunity to build a lucrative career working with your hands if you have the aptitude and passion for it. But the opportunity is never enough. Another thing I learned is that there is a considerable bias in this culture against working with our hands regardless of the opportunity it may afford those so wired. I could feel this bias viscerally in the smallest interaction with the bank teller on days I made deposits and withdrawls in my stellar white wall covering uniform. The days I banked in nice casual clothing or even a suit brought slightly different but discernably better treatment.
Matthew Crawford digs into this bias deeply, first in an article he wrote for New York Times Magazine… and then in the book Shop Class as Soul Craft. Crawford writes:
“High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.
When we praise people who do work that is straight forwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind.”
But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers.
The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car, because they are in India.
If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “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 gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.”
The article continues. I encourage you to follow the article link and even pick up the book.
And his web site is www.matthewbcrawford.com
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