Crawford, Matthew B. "The Case for Working With Your Hands." NEW YORK TIMES May 21, 2009.

The television show Deadliest Catch depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, Dirty Jobs, shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. 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. 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. Dilbert, The Office and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs. 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. This has not come to pass. To begin with, 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. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1.

Fukuyama, Francis. "Making Things Work." NEW YORK TIMES June 5, 2009.

Shop Class as Soulcraft is a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America. Matthew B. Crawford, who owns and operates a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Va., and serves as a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes that all across the United States, high school shop classes teaching mechanical arts like welding, woodworking or carpentry are closing down, to free up funds for computer labs. There is a legion of experts denigrating manual trades like plumber, carpenter and electrician, warning that the United States labor force needs to be “upskilled” and retrained to face the challenges of a high-tech, global economy. Under this new ideology, everyone must attend college and prepare for life as a “symbolic analyst” or “knowledge worker,” ready to add value through mental rather than physical labor. There are two things wrong with this notion, according to Crawford. . . . Find out what these are here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html.

Mooney, Carolyn. "A Hands-On Philosopher Argues for a Fresh Vision of Manual Work." CHRONICLE June 15, 2009.

The faculty job market was as bleak as the Chicago winter when Matthew B. Crawford sent out his first applications. He had just earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, and was serving as a postdoctoral fellow there. But it was while rebuilding his 1975 Honda CB360 motorcycle in a Hyde Park basement during that winter of 2000-1 that Crawford realized just how closely the hands and mind are intertwined. Stumped by a starter motor that wouldn't work, he eventually met a mechanic named Fred Cousins, who ran a few tests before quickly diagnosing the problem. "Then Fred gave me a succinct dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of these Honda starter-motor bushings of the mid-70s," Crawford writes in his newly published book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (Penguin Press, 2009). Crawford never did get a faculty job, but he is flourishing as a hands-on philosopher and motorcycle mechanic. Now 43, he owns a repair shop in Richmond, Va. Shop Class, his first book, has struck a nerve in a status-crazed society where the divide between blue- and white-collar jobs has been growing since the advent of the assembly line early in the 20th century. In his book Crawford argues for a fresh view of skilled labor, especially that of the traditional trades. Go ahead, he's saying: Get your hands dirty. Own your work. His book mixes descriptions of the pleasures and challenges of diagnosing faulty oil seals and rebuilding engines with philosophical views of work — he draws upon Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, among others — and economic analyses for the decline of skilled labor. He laments in particular the recent demise of high-school shop classes, which gave many young men their first manual skills. (Crawford points out that his arguments apply equally to women and says he hopes one day to work on a 1960 Volkswagen bug with his two young daughters.) Skilled manual labor is far more cognitive than people realize, Crawford argues, and deserves more respect. That is especially true during tough economic times, when an independent tradesperson can make a decent and dignified living, and — this is important — can't be outsourced. (You can't get your car fixed in China.) "The question of what a good job looks like — of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored — is more open now than it has been for a long time," he writes. Crawford believes that Americans, in their frenzy to send every kid to college in pursuit of information-age job skills, have lost something valuable. "My sense is that some kids are getting hustled off to college when they'd rather be learning to build things or fix things, and that includes kids who are very smart," he says in an interview. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=9rj47slj8l5ycmlvmykjnl1r43dg1hxb.