Colbert explores Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft"
Posted by tom | Jul 25, 2009As you may know, this week’s Emerging Scholar's Week in Review is up, click here. In case you haven't checked it out, I'd encourage you to watch Stephen Colbert's interview of Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. HT to Derek Melleby's Shop Class as Soulcraft for drawing my attention to this piece.
Note: For the original New Atlantis essay of the same title and various links related to the author/book click here. In the ESN Week in Review I ask,
Alongside being a member of the knowledge making community, do you have skilled, manual competence (in some form)? Do you at times enjoy, even relish, the cognitive demands of manual, blue-collar work? What are your thoughts regarding whether academic labor is understood and/or accepted in our wider culture?
If you haven't already seen it, check out the "Shop Class as Soulcraft" symposium at the Front Porch Republic. I'll admit I haven't followed it -- we just returned from vacation and I was (am) overwhelmed. I did follow your link and read the original article, however.
A lot of good stuff there, and I've witnessed first hand how "knowledge workers" are being turned into clerks. I can't help noting, however, that the people I know who are happiest in their jobs are those who aren't dependent on them for survival: the aerospace engineer/professional musician who says he likes both engineering and music better because he is not tied to either one; the families who can enjoy their farming efforts because they have an external source of income; and the friend who could make a living off of either the books he writes or his job as a teacher, and thoroughly enjoys both because he doesn't need either.
Posted by SursumCorda, Jul 25 2009, 14:22