Matt Crawford Talks Up Shop Class & Manual Labor at Town Hall Tonight

• Matthew Crawford talks about his now-in-paperback book Shop Class as Soulcraft at 7:30 p.m. tonight, May 12, at Town Hall.

I reviewed Matt Crawford's book when it came out in hardback when I was writing for the other site. I'm going to assume I feel the same way about its paperback version, but with the added bonus that the people it's intended for can now afford to buy it. Here's the slightly repurposed take:

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft is a peculiarly engaging read--it's a polemic about the necessity for self-directed work, an "I did it my way" memoir about a political science Ph.D. who resigned from a thinktank to fix motorcycles, and an illuminating critique of the "knowledge worker" paradise.

Probably because of the motorcycle repair, it's getting comparisons to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but Crawford is equally happy to tackle the after-effects of Taylorism and Druckerism, too.

Crawford casts a jaundiced eye on the practice of "upskilling" everyone to become knowledge workers--for one thing, society needs people who know how to make (and fix) things. Plenty of occupations remain that can't be outsourced--no one in India or China can replace your basement's leaky pipes.

But Crawford also draws a distinction between the managerial cubicle worker who devotes their efforts to team performance, and the kind of person who needs to see their accomplishment to feel rewarded by work. A month's uptick on a graph doesn't fill them with pride the same way. His focus on the rewards of working with your hands is an interesting one, because it turns preconceptions about the social status of work on their head.

You're not sorting people into book-smart and non-book-smart piles. Still, how would you console a parent whose full-of-potential kid read your book and decided to forgo academia for learning a trade?

I taught high shool Latin part-time for a year at a public high school. Maybe one kid out of 30 had a real interest in the language; the rest had been told they had to take it to get their SAT scores up. Some of these kids had flunked out of first year Spanish. The SAT-boosting rationale doesn't generate real engagement, and unless you're extremely disciplined it can't sustain the kind of effort it takes to memorize Latin noun declensions.

I think there are a lot of kids, including some who are very smart, who would rather be learning to build things or fix things. It's a natural human desire. I'm certain that if I could have taken a few of those students aside and said, "Hey, let's build a deck together," or "Let's rebuild this engine," they would have perked right up. Mabe they wouldn't have needed quite so much Ritalin.

So it's a question of what sparks that love of learning. The tragedy is that someone who goes to college because he feels he has to, earns Bs and Cs, and then goes on to be, let's say, a mediocre accountant--well, that same guy might have been a crack mechanic or electrician, and be more engaged in what he's doing. So I think we need to take a broader view of what a good job looks like, and stop trying to hustle everybody into a single track, as though there's only one path to success.

What is it about coming in "on the ground floor" in any kind of job that helps prevent the spectacular flameouts you see thanks to purely theory-driven practices?

I think part of the problem is that for the last fifteen years or so, the most prestigious kinds of work for the best and brightest to go into have been, not the genuinely learned professions like medicine, law, and engineering, but rather finance. In that line of work, you're not mastering a body of particulars so much as gaining facility with abstractions. These abstractions, often mathematical, are attractive and prestigious precisely becuase they are generic, seeming to comprehend large swaths of economic activity from afar.

But when you're that far removed from the basic realities that you're making decisions about, you don't get any direct, immediate feedback from the world, so it's easy to mistake your theory for reality. The current economic mess surely has something to do with with this problem of abstraction.

Working in the trades, on the other hand, you're dealing with a physical reality that let's you know right away if you've made a mistake. There's a very real possibility of catastrophe at any moment. I once dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a motorcycle that was practically brand new. I looked around, and there was nobody to blame but myself. That's the kind of mistake you tend not to make twice. So there's a habit of paying attention in the trades, a kind of heedfulness. I think we need more of that.