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

Library Journal

Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Crawford presents a fascinating, important analysis of the value of hard work and manufacturing. He reminds readers that in the 1990s vocational education (shop class) started to become a thing of the past as U.S. educators prepared students for the "knowledge revolution." Thus, an entire generation of American "thinkers" cannot, he says, do anything, and this is a threat to manufacturing, the fundamental backbone of economic development. Crawford makes real the experience of working with one's hands to make and fix things and the importance of skilled labor. His philosophical background is evident as he muses on how to live a pragmatic, concrete life in today's ever more abstract world and issues a clarion call for reviving trade and skill development classes in American preparatory schools. The result is inspired social criticism and deep personal exploration. Crawford's work will appeal to fans of Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and should be required reading for all educational leaders. Highly recommended; Crawford's appreciation for various trades may intrigue readers with white collar jobs who wonder at the end of each day what they really accomplished.
—Dale Farris

Michael Agger

The Barnes & Noble Review

This kind of debasement-by-design, this punishment of our wonted practicality, pains Matthew B. Crawford. It's of a piece with so much else that seems to speak of decadence and infantilization: the digitization of automobile engines, the complexification of telephones and televisions (don't try giving your spasming plasma screen that sharp rap one used to apply to a stuttering TV display). For Crawford, nothing serves as a better synecdoche for our despair than the disappearance of shop class from most high schools. There are technology high schools (where C. P. Snow's "two cultures" of science and the arts are reduced to Excel and Photoshop, respectively), health professions high schools (medical billing and phlebotomy), even arts and performance high schools (polish your portfolio on YouTube!). But nowhere -- certainly not among the blue states -- is one likely to find adolescent Americans stooped placidly beneath the fluorescent lights working a solder gun, a torque wrench, or a tungsten-blade router with the kind of sustained, beatified, moral attention that mechanical work requires. That's how Crawford sees it; that's how the followers of Ned Ludd once saw it as well. But that's not fair to Crawford, who has got chops in both the shop and the seminar room; he's a University of Chicago?trained political philosopher and a motorcycle mechanic. So before dismissing him as a crank with a crankshaft, it's worth examining what he's getting at in his first book, Shop Class as Soul Craft.

Here's Crawford's argument in brief: we've accorded respect and material rewards to those kinds of work that allegedly levy the greatest cognitive demands -- the professions, certainly, but all kinds of white-collar work of managerial and administrative stamp as well. At the same time such work has grown in value, it has been degraded by double-talk, routine, and infantilization, to the degree that it fails to provide the mental stimulation that sustains happy engagement. Our manual trades, meanwhile, have been automated and robbed of social value, marginalizing young workers who feel their call. We feel our children pursue them only when they lose in the competition for places in the white-collar world. Crawford argues that society loses on both fronts: so-called knowledge work becomes a morass of diminished sinecures, while the honorable trades are tarnished. Regardless of the color of our collars, we increasingly lack chances to do work worth attending to -- or taking pride in. Not only the product of our labor, but the quality of our working lives, suffers in the bargain.

Crawford resists the lure of nostalgia -- he's not tracing a corrupting historical process as much as he is anatomizing a disposition, one to which our technology-dependent culture easily falls prey. It's not simply that with increasing automation we become further alienated from a world of tools and competence our forefathers took for granted. The "knowledge workers" of old were highbrows; they couldn't shoe a horse or raise a barn any better than I can rebuild a carbueretor, but the work they did was rich and challenging. Whether writing social novels or making history paintings or running parliaments, whether teaching classics or investigating natural history or crafting letters to faraway friends, highbrows of old did work that required lively and flexible minds. The so-called lowbrows meanwhile not only used tools, they often made them as well, suiting their technologies to novel problems; and the practice of the skilled trades today as ever requires minds as lively and flexible as those required of the actor, the architect, and the novelist.

Today's cognitive labor, however, is mechanized and simplified, broken down into flowcharts and algorithms. In an early chapter that's a tour de force of popular intellectual history, Crawford traces the latter-day evolution of industrialization, showing how its effects now apply to the cubicle and the classroom as much as the factory floor. The first tradespeople to take jobs on the assembly lines rebelled at the enervating repetitiveness of the new factory work; today, industrial methods of business, teaching, and professional work have turned the office into a Dilbertian dystopia, a brightly lit abyss of alienation and self-loathing. "The new frontier of capitalism," Crawford concludes, "lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements." In the midst of this fluorescent wasteland, what's the "spirited man" (or woman) to do? Crawford has an answer: cultivate the need for speed. Learn the ways of metal, oil, and electricity; plumb the mysteries of internal combustion.

For the speedway and the motorcycle repair shop have been Crawford's salvation, as he tells us in loving detail. Emerging from a childhood spent in the effete realm of the vegetarians and mathematicians who were the adults of his childhood, Crawford found solace in shaping energies to the zero-sum requirements of building and maintaining Things With Engines. Exploring the motorhead's dedication, he limns its deeply moral qualities -- sustained attention on focal practices; subtle recognition of pattern and variation that comes with true mastery; easy and intimate familiarity with the idea of excellence. Crawford's descriptions of his manual mentors and their skills as well as his précis of the philosophy of work and value offer lively and suggestive reading.

Shop Class as Soul Craft is as spirited as the way of life it recommends; its author is as quick with a quote from Anaxagoras as he is well versed in the ways of the spanner wrench and the voltmeter. Crawford doesn't explore fully the deficits that the trades carry -- how they need highbrows just as highbrows need them. The liberal arts are so called because they involve books; they're neither above nor below but complementary to the manual arts, the trades. Traditionally, it was understood that society needed both in fruitful engagement with one another. Extolling the shopkeeper and craftsperson's practical mien, useful skills, and satisfying labors, Crawford risks forgetting that the same set of dispositions can breed complacency and small-mindedness when turned to the work of making and maintaining a society.

We do well to follow the way outlined in Richard Sennett's magisterial book The Craftsman (to which Crawford offers grateful acknowledgment). There, Sennett describes ways in which the moral disposition of the skilled trades offers a healthy approach to kinds of world-making work, whether pursued in the study, the cubicle, or the shop. We can lament our enervation -- or we can make the tools we need to render our work and lives moral and meaningful. (Have you checked Google? The instructions required are probably available online.) There are skilled approaches to knowledge work, household work, and teaching work as well as to machine work; the spirited disposition Crawford celebrates should be brought to bear however one pursues a living. Failing a shop-class renascence, it may be our best hope. --Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles is the author of Library: An Unquiet History. He has written about language, technology, and history for such publications as The American Scholar, The Boston Sunday Globe, and Harper's.