Who Needs a College Education? Soul, Craft and the Meaning of Work

I am reading a remarkable book right now, just published by the Penguin Press, called Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. I say “remarkable” because I am about to remark upon it. But also because its author Matthew B. Crawford skillfully hints at a notion that has long troubled me: a four-year college education is not what it’s cracked up to be.
Every Fall semester at the university where I teach writing, I gaze out at the fields of blank faces sitting before me. Sometimes I ask: Do you really want to be here? Two-thirds of the class usually answers, “No.” Those students are here because their parents made them come, or because they felt peer pressure to attend college. They would like to make “a lot of money,” but beyond that, they have no clue why they are sitting in Freshman Writing.
Still, my university keeps upping its enrollment, and the state advisory board for higher education has mapped out a plan to double the number of college graduates in Kentucky by the year 2020. I understand these goals, of course. We are a very poor, very under-educated state. We rank at the bottom of the list on just about everything. So the conventional thinking says: increase education, hand out more diplomas, raise the standard of living.
But in Shop class as Soulcraft, Crawford asks us to reconsider our definitions of education and the personal fulfillment that it promises. Crawford earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000. In a bleak academic job market, he went to work for a policy organization in D.C. Gradually, he began to find the work soul-crushing and increasingly unethical. He was forced to make arguments he didn’t really buy, and at the end of the day, what had he really accomplished? He found himself sitting in his K Street office, thinking about a friend, Fred, who repaired motorcycles. The work was honest, useful, and at end of the day, Fred’s happy customer cranked up his rebuilt Kawasaki Ninja and sailed off.
Crawford quit his D.C. job and opened his own motorcycle repair shop. In doing so, he taught himself the value of working with one’s hands and he began to contemplate why we, as Americans, so often denigrate such work. After all, it wasn’t your plumber who bundled derivatives and send your 401k crashing. It wasn’t your mechanic who talked you into a sub-prime loan. Nor will their jobs get outsourced to India. So why don’t we value this work? Why don’t we seek it out?
The problem, says Crawford, is, well, dirt. These men and women get dirty. “Because the work is dirty,” he writes, “people assume it is also stupid.” And yet the very work “culture” has its roots in the Latin cultus, meaning cultivation of the soil. Of dirt. It is a dark indication of how far, as Americans, we have drifted from Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, self-reliant nation.
What’s more Crawford argues that he is tasked with far tougher cognitive problems when trying to figure out the inner machinations of a vintage European motorcycle then when working on K Street.
Beyond that, the work is ethical. He must take responsibility for it; he must look his customers in the eye. That responsibility situates him within a community rather than an anonymous network of immoral financial transactions.
I also appreciate Crawford’s resurrection of the word “craft.” As we have lost respect for the working class, we have also lost our respect for the well-made, the hand-crafted. In 1925, the German poet Rilke was already complaining bitterly:
“To our grandparents, a “house,” a “well,” a family steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate—almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life ….”
All of these mass-produced dummies of life have led us to a culture based on what Worldwatch Institute president Lester Brown calls a “fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy.” Those fossil fuels gave us vinyl siding and aisles of plastic, and the automobiles gave us the means to go procure it all. Our age of accumulation found little room, and little time, for craftsmanship.
One reason might be that craftsmanship is the blending of beauty and use, two things we have relegated to separate corners of our culture. One exists in a museum, the other in the discount furniture store. We think of art, by definition, as useless, and too often, we accept useful things that have absolutely no aesthetic qualities. But this is a troubling and unsatisfying dichotomy. It marginalizes art and the aesthetic, and it too easily accepts the uninspired and the mass-produced in our everyday lives.
But a true appreciation of craft might return us to a more satisfying economy where quality matters more than quantity because the human spirit trades more in beauty than in dollars. Indeed, this is an imperative. The global climate crisis and the reality of peak oil will not allow us to continue believing in the economist’s dream of endless economic growth. What we need is a dynamic, steady-state economy where real work—the kind Crawford describes—is valued again.
American 18-year-olds who want to be carpenters or mechanics or chefs should not be shuttled into four-year degree programs. The quality of all education would improve if we allowed the young to pursue their own version of knowledge, their own idea of rewarding work.