The Case for Working With Your Hands - NYTimes.com
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such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar.
Highlighted by dionewang
Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you
often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts
Highlighted by dionewang
Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive.
Highlighted by marciaj72
Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the
experience of individual agency can be elusive.
Highlighted by dionewang
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
Highlighted by marciaj72
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.
Highlighted by dionewang
When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly 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
Highlighted by dionewang
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.
Highlighted by dionewang
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
Highlighted by dionewang
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.
Highlighted by dionewang
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.
Highlighted by marciaj72
If the goal is to earn a living
Highlighted by jimbeau
“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.”
Highlighted by dionewang
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.
Highlighted by dionewang
A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive.
Highlighted by jimbeau
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