Shop class as soulcraft

What an absolutely marvelous article. Crawford seems to identify the central problem with the "college for everybody!" impulse of today--the fact that many white-collar jobs are already as unsatisfying and unrewarding as the factory jobs used to be, and that there's little sense in pouring out money or taking on large debt in order to get a degree so that you can become a powerless cog in a supremely uninteresting machine so that somebody else can become rich while you struggle just to pay back what you owe.

My favorite bit: "...gratuitous ontological insecurity is no fun for most people." That ought to be an unofficial Crunchy Con motto, if you ask me.

I'm a software engineer, and take the sort of pride in accomplishment that the author of the essay describes.

That said, I don't produce a product I can point to. If I start to describe what I do, people's eyes glaze over.

That's why I took up knitting a few years ago. It gives me something to show for my work, plus I can do something for others (I knit a baby blanket for both of my children when they were born).

There's something soul-satisfying about doing things that engage the sense of touch. Maybe touching solid matter and manipulating it keeps us grounded in reality. Sitting in a cube under buzzing flouresent lights sure doesn't.

And one finds joy in the physical in the strangest places. I used to be a military intelligence officer in the Army; when the Cold War ended, I got a pat on the back and told I had 90 days to leave the service - bye bye to my career. Because of a few odd circumstances (including a divorce), I ended up back in Colorado working at a Target stocking shelves over-night. We were a motley crew: along with work release guys from the county jail, I worked with a former aerospace engineer who had worked on the shuttle program and a graduate of Harvard divinity school. There I was, someone with two degrees and 10 years of military experience humping boxes for a couple of bucks an hour. I'll admit that it did get depressing sometimes, but what made it bearable was the actual work; the whole process of clearing out the truck each night, loading the pallets, jacking the pallets all around the store (I still wish I had a pallet jack just for the hell of it), getting everything on the shelves, running the fork lifts - it was fun! After a year, I wandered off to law school and have worked in state government for 10 years; I really enjoy my job, but I still think about running those pallets.

From the article: a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.

There's an older name for it: Gnosticism. The end-game sci-fi vision is that we leave our bodies behind entirely, and just drift off into the digital noosphere. No thanks.

I've really been liking these recent posts - IMO there are some really critical questions being asked here.

Bad advice - why waste time (your own) and money (probably from your parents or the taxpayers) in college if you're going into a career that doesn't require a degree?

I obtained a business degree in 1990. Since then I have been a shipping clerk (like CB above, we had some great times with the pallet jack), a telemarketing office supervisor, an account manager at a bank, a substitute teacher, a property manager, and (off and on) an independent software developer (following a year at an IT college in 2001-2002). Like Salamander and Jim T. above, I enjoy and take pride in writing clean, efficient and clever code when I'm putting a database application together for a school or a small business. I sure don't get the same rush when I write a comprehensive report for the government when doing my current day job (property manager).

One of my hobbies is renovating our home - actually, I think it's more accurate to say that it's my wife's hobby to dream up projects for me to complete - and while I enjoy working with my hands and I take pride in the various things I have done to our 112-year-old house, I don't think I would be any good as a construction worker. Jobs are done well (forgive my vanity), but I'm too slow/cautious/methodical.

Bottom line: I like the feeling of "creating" something. I can relate to the electrician's satisfaction of knowing that even if no one sees it, the wiring hidden in the wall is artfully installed. The code behind the software created by me and used by a local car dealer is artfully conceived. The support beams under my covered verandah are put together just ever so. I know they're there and how I built them, and it doesn't matter if no one sees them.

Did my business degree open some doors for me? Sure it did. Has it helped me find a career I like, or has it added value to the different things I actually create? Unfortunately, no.