Matthew Crawford, who wrote the interesting essay Shop Class as Soulcraft (which I linked to way back when) has a whole book on the topic out. (Yes, I ordered a copy).

He also has a short interview promoting the book up at Popular Mechanics.

One of the arguments he makes - which others also make (including my beloved Mike Rowe, whom I love even more after hearing his talk - someone who is classically educated, but who takes on all kinds of manual labor, and who likes and respects the people who do it*), is that not everyone needs to go to college.

(*If you're a real animal-activist type you might not want to watch the video - or, rather, you might want to watch it with an unclosed mind because Rowe talks about how the supposedly more-humane method of castrating sheep seemed to traumatize them more than the quick and more-violent-seeming traditional method)

That, as a society, we need to promote alternative career paths.

And I agree with that. Even as a college teacher. You'd think someone who teaches at the college level for a living would be all about pushing more and more people to go (job security!), but I've seen too many people who were unhappy and were going to college because of family pressures. Or because someone told them they'd never amount to anything if they didn't. Or because they didn't know what they wanted to do, and their high school counselor pushed them to go to college.

I even once had a student who admitted to me that he was trying to fail out so that he could just go back home and get a job. Because that was all he really wanted.

At the same time, there ARE people who are very geared to go to college - I know I was - I loved the whole idea, I was excited to be going, I even enjoyed (on some level) the hard work and long hours of study. I was motivated to do it for its own sake, or for the internal satisfaction of knowing I had completed it. But I know not everyone is the same way.

And so I do think that trade schools, and apprenticeships of a sort, and learning-on-the-job is very important. And we need people who can do stuff - who can plumb well, or fix a car (in the Popular Mechanics article, he talks about how some places are having a hard time finding decent mechanics. And I know where I take my car to be fixed, the average age of mechanics working there seems to be close to 50).

And I think also - as the original article said - people should care about doing something well for its own sake. For some (like me) that was writing a good research paper (and now, teaching stuff so people can understand). For others that may be rewiring a house the right way, or building cabinets, or cooking food, or playing the violin. (And of course, in my away-from-work life, a lot of the satisfaction I feel comes from knitting clothing, or making quilts, or playing the piano, or even baking bread).

But I don't know. In our culture lately we've become conditioned to wanting the fastest and cheapest, and I wonder if there's still much of a market for hand-built furniture, or real bakery bread, or if most people would rather have something that's not quite so good but is cheaper (and therefore, they can have more of it: my mother talks about how people have more clothes now than she did growing up, because clothing is on average a smaller percentage of a person's paycheck - true, a lot of it is much more poorly made, and a lot of it may come from places with questionable labor practices - but it's cheaper, and so someone can have five pairs of jeans instead of two. And you don't have to worry so much about taking care of stuff. I know I'm kind of an anomaly because I still wear clothing I had 10 or more years ago - but I take care of stuff; I'm careful how I wash it, I mend problems as they come up, and I try not to be hard on my "good" clothes)

I mean, emotionally and spiritually I LIKE the idea of us turning into a nation of craftspeople, where there is care and love that goes into making commercial goods (and things are made here, or at the very least, are made by people who have decent working conditions and are making a decent wage). But practically speaking (especially in this economy), I wonder if it could work, if we could go back to that more agrarian-nation ideal.

But at any rate. I await the book to see how Crawford has expanded on his original ideas. I admit that sometimes these more pie-in-the-sky type idealist books frustrate me (I read one, called "The Bones of the Earth" over break that had me really irritated - one of the author's premises seemed to be that we should go back to small individual stores - grocers and butchers and such - rather than the big "super store" type set up. And my response to that was pure irritation: that kind of thing might have worked a treat in the 1950s when more women were at home. But in my household, I am BOTH breadwinner and bonne femme, and so having to shop at five or six little stores - some of which would doubtless open from 8 until 3, the exact hours I am in class - would be largely impossible for me. And there were a few other things the author said that made me think he was someone who had only ever lived in high density settings - where you don't need a car, for instance - and had never been in the emptier middle of the country where long drives for things are the norm and there's really nothing to be done about it.)

And for that matter, could we not have both? I have earlier alluded to my dream society - a place with plumbers who read Shakespeare because it interests them, or officeworkers who keep a volume of short stories in their desk drawer for odd moments. Or homemakers who study calculus. Or, I suppose, college professors with the quixotic goal of learning to play the piano well, even if they are almost 40 before they start learning...a society where no one is defined solely by how they earn their livings.