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Matthew B. Crawford straddles two worlds: He has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He also operates a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond and is author of the best-selling 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, in which he argues that too often students are forced into a college track when manual trades offer a viable and rewarding alternative. Here are excerpts from the book:
“Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into ‘college prep’ and ‘vocational ed’ is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one's life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don't learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future.”
Matthew B. Crawford, motorcycle mechanic and philosopher. (www.matthewbcrawford.com/Robert Adamo)
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“The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life.”
“Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is an ethical virtue.”
“I landed the job at the think tank because I had a prestigious education in the liberal arts, yet the job itself felt illiberal: coming up with the best arguments money could buy. This wasn't work befitting a free man, and the tie I wore started to feel like the mark of the slave.”
“At issue in the contrast between office work and the manual trades is the idea of individual responsibility, tied to the presence or absence of objective standards.”
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