The first in the series Sigh Alert: Reviews of Book I’ll Get Around to Reading, Someday:
Matthew Crawford earns a Ph.D. in philosphy and — surprise! — finds the rigors of the underside of academic distasteful. It’s apparently difficult to find steady work teaching philosphy at noted universities. So he gives up, sets up a motorcycle shop and announces that the problem isn’t his choice of an academic pursuit synonymous with saturated applicant pools and fierce competition and scholarly inanity, but the whole gosh darn system. It’s all broken, damn it! He opens a motorcyle repair shop, doing what he loved to do as a kid, and now thinks that a sizable cohort of would-be scholars would be better off in trade schools, fixing cars, wiring electricity and laying bricks. And maybe he’s right. My father-in-law knows how to do all sorts of tasks with his hands, and I’m envious — I’d love to hang drywall or woodwork and such. Sure, fixing cars and building things has brain-power expending components, but you’d have to be a pathetically helpless weenie to not know this. It’s a shame schools are cutting shop classes, as Crawford claims; it’s absolutely true that many of these non-college jobs pay much better than office jobs. But the point of an education isn’t just to find a job. The point of an education is learning how to process information, how to critique it. Motorcycle mechanics don’t need college classes to learn how to fix bikes — but they might need a college education to learn how to engage civically, how to relate and tolerate others, how to adapt, adapt, adapt in society that changes by the decade and, these days, but the year. Otherwise, we’ll have smooth-running motorcycles on roads occupied by seriously clueless people — sort of exactly what we have now. If Crawford’s contention is that office work is menial and degrading, so why not just work with your hands, then he’s missing a big fact of existence that makes me take him less seriously: Most jobs suck, at least sometimes. I bet if you ask 100 motorcycle mechanics — not the ones who own shops like Crawford — they’d tell you their job sucks sometimes.
Tags: college, motorcycle, new york times, npr, shop class, shop class as soulcraft, souls
