I was mostly-felled last night by a bad sinus headache. (It happens every fall. It seems that my sinuses, like temperate-region lakes, need to experience a
seasonal turnover every fall and spring.
(And it shows hints of redeveloping this morning. Even though I decided not to do my usual workout lest it bring on the headache)
I was still feeling well enough to read, though. I'm working my way through Matthew Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft," a book which apparently grew from
this essay.
It's an interesting book. I do think in some cases the author maybe overstates his point a bit - the anti-consumerist ideas, for example.
(And it also brings home an idea I've contemplated for a while: that the traditional labels of "conservative" and "liberal," in re politics or general worldview, are probably no longer useful and should be replaced...or perhaps that labeling is itself useless. Crawford is (I am guessing from some of the things he said) conservative-leaning politically, but some of his comments on "modern consumer society" sound like things a more left-leaning professorial type would say. I suspect he's actually what's sometimes known as a "Crunchy Con," or a "granola conservative," which in and of themselves are not useful or helpful labels. But whatever. Still, I think the idea of labeling someone based on their political ideology seems kind of useless; I have spoken, for example, with 'social conservatives' who want as many restrictions on behavior as some of the most statist liberals I've spoken with (though which behaviors should be restricted, and how, differ between the two groups.)
Anyway. Politics makes people hateful, in my experience, which is why I generally listen far more than I talk when political ideas are being tossed about.)
Anyway. Part of his hypothesis is that the consumer-driven society is alienating people from actually "doing" stuff - that, because it's so much easier to pop a CD into the player than it is, say, to pick up a guitar and learn how to play it, people content themselves with doing the "simple" thing, and the advertisers make it seem as if they are actually "doing" something. (I am not saying this very well).
He gives the example of the Toyota "Scion" line, with the various trick-out options that people can purchase, and presents it as an example of the modern, "debased," individuality - in contrast with the old-time shade-tree mechanics who knew what they were doing, who cared about making the engines work right and stuff.
And while I'm not sure I want to return to a world where I'm designing and making my own clothes, and changing my own oil (which I can do in theory but prefer to pay the nice men at my mechanic's shop to do for me), I kind of sort of see the basis of his point.
It makes more sense when he talks about work. He gives the example from Pirsig's "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" where Pirsig brings his bike into a shop because it is making a strange noise (it turns out that an oil pin has sheared off and is lodged in an intake). The "mechanics" - who are mostly cavorting around being non-serious - barely look at it before one declares that it must be the tappets. And then he proceeds to butcher the bike, ruining several parts on it in his drive to get to the tappets. Crawford concludes that these are employees who do not care about their job, have not been taught to care.
He argues that a lot of the sort of traditional "diagnostic" work - he uses engine repair (which he has done himself) and medicine as examples; I can think of a couple others I'll mention in a minute - are a very high level sort of thought process; you can't reduce diagnosing a patient to a checklist, you can't do a phone consult to find out what's wrong with an engine.
(This is part of his larger argument that the manual trades should be more promoted - for one thing, you can't outsource plumbing to India).
But he argues that the kind of careful attention being a good diagnostician at whatever it is you do it not taught, not promoted in the schools - instead, there's a lot of sort of fuzzy, "We're training them to be
knowledge workers!" attitude, and, he claims, a disdain for the traditional trades.
And you know, I think I can kind of buy that. (And I wonder how much of the push to get students "achieving" on standardized tests is displacing the old traditional habits of attentiveness to things, of focusing deeply on single concepts or subjects, and is replaced by a sort of surficial knowledge)
I see some of the attitudes he talks about in some of my students - the idea of "OK, I've seen that plant, now it's time to move on." I have horrible frustrations in labs where students need to examine things on slides, or where they have to learn to identify plants, or when I ask them to make sketches of soil invertebrates. Because they want to rush through. Twenty seconds is not long enough to understand what's going on with a cross-section of a corn root.
The point of drawing "stuff" to learn about it is not to make artistic drawings. It is to pay attention to it for long enough to come to see the detail. I always have students protest that they 'can't draw' or that they "don't know how to draw" and such. I tell them the point is not to make art; the point is for them to observe. By and large, a lot of them rush through the drawings (sometimes even doing them in ballpoint), the drawings lack nuance, in a few cases I've caught people trying to copy the line drawings from the identification book rather than drawing the actual critter in front of them.
However, I have to say, I have sympathy for them. I remember a grass and graminoid identification class I took in grad school where the prof would bring in the flowering heads of grasses, hand us each three or four, point us to a dissecting microscope and tell us to spend a minimum of fifteen minutes drawing each grass. At first I protested, with the same protests my students now use. But my professor, sighing a bit, said, "Just look at them. Spend more time looking at them than you do drawing them at first. Try to pick out the detail. Think about what you would want to know in order to identify this thing in the field."
And then one day, it was sort of like something clicked: I could draw the grasses! It made sense to me! And my drawings were actually pretty good, in the sense of actually looking like the model.
(In his book, Crawford describes being asked - as part of his mechanic's training, as a way to learn to "look at things" - to draw a skeleton, and the poor job he did at first, because he let the "cartoon" concept he had in his mind get in the way of seeing the actual model skeleton set up before him).
And learning to identify plants is learning a sort of diagnostic process. It takes patience. It takes a certain humility, too - being willing to be wrong, being willing to admit you don't know something. A very common mistake people make (and I know I made) when first learning to identify plants is that when you know a small handful of things, you want to shoehorn stuff you see into those different categories - I remember, for example, before I knew what
Iva annua was, I was trying to call it ragweed, even though somewhere in the back of my head I KNEW the leaves were wrong (the flowering parts do look somewhat similar). I think most people beginning to identify plants make this mistake - there is an arrogant part of the brain that wants to declare "I KNOW this" and move on, instead of going, "Wait a minute...this doesn't fit with what I know."
Actually, as I got better at identifying plants, I realized that a lot of the time there is stuff I didn't know. And that it's OK to say, Well, this is "Unknown #3" and I'm going to take a sample of it and take it back to the lab and key it out, or find someone more knowledgeable than me to tell me.
And now, I'm fairly good at identifying plants. And there's a certain joy in that, just like the joy Crawford describes in finally figuring out the problem with an engine and knowing how to fix it. It's a joy even beyond knowing you're doing the job you're paid to do, even beyond being able to impress students. There's a joy in knowing how to do it, in applying that hard-won knowledge. In doing something right.
Students often ask me, when I identify a plant, "How do you KNOW?" I can't really answer that and I know I have annoyed people in the past when I simply respond,
"Gestalt". But it is kind of a
gestalt thing: you have to look at the whole of the plant, consider the characteristics, the leaf shape, the leaf color, match them all against the patterns in your head, and come to a conclusion. If they press me for more explanation I tell them that it's simply years of experience, years of working with the stuff, of having profs and bosses who knew the stuff and taught me the tricks of how to identify it, tricks and knowledge that I will pass on if they are just patient enough to want to receive it. (Many are not).
I think a similar process happens with people who work with computers. I've had limited experience observing it directly, but I've known a few "computer guys" in my life, and there's a certain fervor when something's wrong with a computer, a certain drive to get it fixed over and above the fact that someone will pay you when it's fixed, it's a desire to make it right, to succeed at the task. And in most cases they're "soloing" - they're not, say, opening the case, then passing it on to a guy who tests the motherboard, who passes it to some other guy who looks at the hard drive. It's one guy, one computer, and a lot of knowledge and experience.
And Crawford argues that a lot of modern education - preparing the "knowledge workers" of the future - ignores this fundamental human desire, to interact with the world and to, as he said, have "agency" in it - to have both control of and submission to the process. (You have to be willing to "listen" to the machine - or the plant - as well as draw on your own knowledge).
He also says that a lot of the dissatisfaction a lot of workers feel is because they do not have this "agency" - that their jobs are largely reduced to a script, that they feel like what they are doing doesn't have an impact, that they never see the finished product.
And I think, while again he may overstate his points, there is some truth to that. My brother used to work for a large insurance concern. He was using his math background - working out models of fire risk for areas in the Southwest (actually, it may well have included the area where I live). But he found the work unrewarding because he never wrote a WHOLE model. He did part of the number-crunching, then it got passed on to someone else. And he described it as feeling like a cog in a machine. (There were other factors - the "Office Space"-like corporate culture - that got to him as well. I think being raised by academics is perhaps a bit like being raised by wolves: you don't ever entirely fit into "normal" society). Ultimately he quit (thanks to his marrying a wife who had a decent job), went back to school, earned a divinity degree, and is now a campus representative for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. He has a lot more autonomy, he has to use his intelligence guided by experience a lot more, and he's a lot happier.
So Crawford makes the argument that "one size fits all" education - the idea that "everyone" should go to college - is not a good idea. That trade schools should be promoted more - there are a lot of people with excellent aptitude to be mechanics, who would be bored silly (or worse) filing TPS reports. And we need mechanics. And plumbers. And electricians. But somehow, some misplaced idea of "egalitarianism" and wanting to "elevate" people above manual work has made it seem distasteful to suggest trade school to a kid - the kid has to have the drive and maturity to request it for himself, rather than be tracked along to college.
And I'm not saying someone who wants to be a plumber shouldn't GO to college if they want to. I bet business classes and maybe accounting (if they plan to keep their own books) would be tremendously helpful. Let alone the folks who just have an interest in something and want to do course work in it. (The problem being: most college is so expensive now, that unless you're an independently wealthy layabout, going to study, say, Chaucer, when your aim is not to earn your bread by being a Chaucer scholar, is seen as somehow suspect and wasteful).
I don't have any grand ideas for "fixing" education or "fixing" society. I do think more of an honoring of the "skilled trade" sort of work - and reminding kids that that's a very real option as a way to make a good living (and in fact, a good living that is more dependent, I suspect, on their own drive and their own hard work, than any cubicle or civil-service job is) - is a good place to start.
It's an interesting book. (I've not even touched on some of the stuff he's said about learning to play an instrument, which rings true for me). I'm not even 175 pages in to it and already I have all those things to say about it.
