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Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

Description

A philosopher/mechanic's wise (and sometimes funny) look at the challenges and pleasures of working with one's hands

Called "the sleeper hit of the publishing season" (The Boston Globe), Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.

Reviews

Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-08-29
Summary: "The psychology may be good, but some of the economics is risible"

I have mixed feelings about the book. I understand what the author is driving at with regards to tacit knowledge, the way we really learn and understand things, the inadequacy of 3-ring-binder interchangeable approaches to doing certain jobs.

But I don't think he has a good appreciation for the real economics behind why mechanized work really dominated the economy. He is talking in one chapter about alienated workers on an assembly line producing cars that will be "ripped away by the capitalist class" never to be seen by the same class of people that built them. If anything, the exact opposite is the case!

The advent of the assembly line and mechanized labor produced some of the first cars that were made efficiently enough to be affordable by the laborers. On the other hand - hand-tooled vehicles, a modern example would be Porsches, can never be more than the playthings of the wealthy - no one else has the time to indulge such hobbies, or the ability to pay for that much skilled human attention.

Efficiency may end up producing mindless jobs that are crushingly dull, but it is also an extremely important economic good, in that it brings the price of objects once requiring thousands of skilled man-hours to produce into the reach of the middle class. We don't have flying cars because gen-av aircraft never developed beyond the low rate/skilled production stage. We do have personal computers, because their production, once done by PhDs hand-wire-wrapping each board, is now done automatically by robots.

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Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2010-08-25
Summary: "a few interesting stories padded with a lot of hot air"

The idea of the book is great, and I really enjoyed the few stories of problem diagnosis and solution - the stories of his actual work on actual bikes or actual cars are great stuff. Unfortunately that is less than 10% of the book. The philosophy, the quotations, citations and name dropping - My Eyes Glazed Over [MEGO] - it seemed at best pointless - and the philosophical writing is as artificial as the mechanical anecdotes were real. Glad I bought this as a remainder.

And yes, I went to engineering school. "mens et manus"

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-04
Summary: "Very good book, shows what wrong with education today"

I enjoyed this book very much. I has always said its a shame that the schools in this country have stopped teaching Industrial Arts. I don't care if you go on to be a heart surgeon you still have to know how to use hand tools !

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-07-31
Summary: "Are we getting more stupid with every passing year?"

We have become a throwaway society. We discard items because it's more convenient to replace than to repair. In college, students become intellectually disengaged. Degrees are nothing more than credentials, and universities do little to cultivate knowledge. "Degradation of work is often based on efforts to replace the intuitive judgments of practitioners with rule following." p.232

Mr. Crawford has many valid gripes about the state of affairs since the industrial revolution, but his criticism of the knowledge sector is thinly based on his relatively brief work experience in this arena. Most of his professional background is in trade crafts such as wiring houses and repairing motorcycles.

In a mass production/consumption society, consistency, reliability and production speed are crucial to serving people's needs. In such a demanding environment, the more production is reliant on rules rather than individuality, the more efficiently this objective is realized. This point does not illude Mr. Crawford, as he is also critical of a mass consumption society. Ultimately, Mr. Crawford must favor a world population a fraction of the current 7 billion. Only then, can the world offer many of its citizens meaningful work that is personalized, where producers interact directly with customers rather than sit in cubes and conform to corporate social rules devoid of any value than advancing the interests of management. And if the world population does not decline significantly, at least shop classes should once again become a big part of K through 12 curriculum to give Mr. Crawford some relief of his angst.

As long as plumbers' cracks are visible to the naked eye, parents will prefer to put their kids through college to prepare them for a stake in the knowledge economy. Mr. Crawford's points are very observant and valid, but he is beating a dead horse. Change has been with us for some time, and the pace will continue to increase, and there is no looking back. Not all work is meaningful, but then again, one's profession shouldn't define him as a person. There is more to life than work, and satisfaction can come from hobbies such as repairing motorcycles, or investing time in family.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-28
Summary: "A voice for that nagging feeling...."

Architecture is under this squeeze! Absolutely right on!
The Architectural profession is being assaulted by "BIM" software - software that automatically generates building components - often from vendor supplied details. Young interns are taught to use "predefined" tools for complicated waterproofing and structural assemblies. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of some one & ask them to draw a simple head, jamb, or sill detail --- what do you get?
I rest my case!