“Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” is the title.
I've worked with my hands all my adult life. I was sixteen years old when I left secondary school to be a laborer in a Yorkshire nursery, awaiting my enlistment date in the RAF's former and storied direct entry engine fitter program. Being an RAF engine fitter was a Zen training of a unique nature. No work is more painstaking in detail, and yet so solid and massive in scale, than the repair and maintenance of 5-ton engines meant to defy gravity. A poor engine fitter, I soon found out, one without interior calm and moral reserve, is likely to build all his personality traits into the motor. Also in the RAF Mountain Rescue service, I got to see the results first hand.
Somehow this all stuck with me, and I avoided the usual trap where PhD-qualified individuals are doomed to spend their days without touching anything not made of paper. These days I can just as easily be found in the garden or building or fixing something as I can be found in the office writing or reading something, and I also manage to teach a lot of shop. I often like to get students to think about the value of working with your hands and whether or not it deserves the low social esteem it generally receives.
Here's the best sentence I found in Crawford's extract:
"The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken."
I can think of a few folks in public life who could use to better know when they are mistaken, couldn't you? Isn't the death and destruction we see in Somalia, or Afghanistan, or a hundred other trouble spots, the work of poor policy mechanics?
Maybe we'll assign this book this fall in our barn-building class.
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