While doing the work of a mechanic provides intellectual challenges and the intrinsic satisfactions of completing problems from start to finish, Crawford knows that working in the trades is seen as déclassé and too limiting for a college graduate. And then he goes on to show how stupid that viewpoint is.
The first piece of evidence to consider is a quote from the Princeton economist Alan Blinder about how the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.
Now you begin to understand why you watch The Office. The cubicle life is amorphous. What are you actually making? How do you know if you are advancing at your job? Does sending e-mail all day help the brand? Does my boss think I am a good guy? It's an absurd situation, and "self-referential irony supplied by pop culture" helps one cope with that absurdity. Crawford looks around at the sociologists who have studied office life and concludes that the office is best approached as a "place of moral education" with managers acting as therapists, concentrating on helping us become team players. The "team" is what launches the product, lands the account, drives the business. "The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect," writes Crawford. And worse: "He has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise." The team makes us passive and helpless.
Add Sticky Note
- Interesting take on the team ethic. Economically helpful, spiritually devastating?
  posted by cburell on 2009-05-23
But what distinguishes Crawford from his predecessors is how far blue-collar work, both in numbers and prestige, has fallen since even the '70s. Shop Class surveys an economic landscape where everyone must go to college or else be viewed as suspect, stupid, and/or unemployable. The massification of higher education has also created a new vocational pitfall: I've got a degree; therefore, I should be doing smart, clean, fun, and well-paid work. Except for clean, these adjectives can be scarce in cubicle alley.
Now, I don't want to leave you with the impression that Crawford is sending us all off to plumbing school. He's not idiotic. His macroeconomic argument is this: "We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power. … But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed)." You might call Crawford a locavore of work. He wants economic policies that are human in scale and provide maximum opportunity for self-reliance and self-employment. That may sound like Declaration of Independence language, but it's not an amber-encased ideal. As Crawford shows, all freedom takes is a little willingness to get your hands greasy.

The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple

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Amazon.com: Babylonian Wisdom Literature: W. G. Lambert: Books

i want!!!

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The Official Website of I.F. Stone

The Best of I.F. Stone

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Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the origin of species by means ofnatural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in thestruggle for life. London: John Murray. 1st edition.

Complete text online, every edition. all of darwin's works, actually.

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Jerry Coyne's new book 'Why Evolution is True' presents the science that coheres into fact - Arts - Cleveland.com

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Who Was Jesus? | Friendly Atheist by Hemant Mehta

Good comment thread suggests readings on the questions "Did Jesus even exist?" and "Who was he?"

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Jay Mathews - Geoffrey Canada and Education's Future - washingtonpost.com

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High Stakes Education: Inequality ... - Google Book Search

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Amazon.com: High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (Critical Social Thought): Pauline Lipman: Books

Studies Arne Duncan's Chicago Public Schools.

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5Expand

Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century (Review of Postman book)

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Postman offers a wide-ranging perspective on events and trends from 18

th,

19

th

,

and 20

th

centuries. He reminds us, for instance, of the concept of tabula rasa: “Locke

wanted education to result in a rich, varied, and copious book; Rousseau wanted

education to result in a healthy flower. … Children are [today seen as] neither blank

tablets nor budding plants. They are markets; that is to say, consumers whose needs for

products are roughly the same as the needs of adults.” Children are not seen as members

of society with special requirements, but just another market segment.

Postman looks at how the nature of education has changed; he points out some

serious short-comings he finds in contemporary educational practices. Viewed from a

slightly different perspective, children are not simply a market segment but a largely

passive audience for an expanding use of technology. And education’s own increasing

reliance on technology poses a serious short-coming. He writes, “Before the printing

press, children became adults by learning to speak, for which all people are biologically

programmed. After the printing press, children had to earn adulthood by achieving

literacy, for which people are not biologically programmed. This meant that schools had

to be created. … And it is my contention that with the assistance of other media such as

radio, film, and records, television has the power to lead us to childhood’s end. … There

is no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television … .

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no

such thing as remedial television-watching.”
Add Sticky Note
- I question the TV watching skills. There's much to intelligence "reading" of TV.
  posted by cburell on 2008-12-22
What should we do to bring some sense of

integrity (in the sense of integratedness) back into school? Firstly, Postman wants us to

remember the importance of a historical narrative. That narrative provides continuity and

connections and above all context. We don’t have to re-invent ourselves with each new

generation (baby-boomers, baby-busters, Gen-X). We have a long history and a valuable

collection of lessons-learned. We would do well to remember the story and build on it.

On the other hand, we can’t assume that we have discovered The Truth in that narrative.

So, secondly, to balance that narrative we need to introduce (or re-introduce?) critical

thinking into the school curriculum as a useful response to mindless viewing of

technology or listening to the narrative. “Wisdom,” he reminds us, “means knowing

what questions to ask about knowledge. … Wisdom does not imply having the right

answers. It implies only asking the right questions.”
Add Sticky Note
- This is why I'm such a huge proponent of narrative history and interdisciplinary studies.
  posted by cburell on 2008-12-22
Students need to understand the

need to be both answer-givers and question-askers.

Amazon.com: Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns: Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, Michael B. Horn: Books

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Amazon.com: Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood: A. S. Neill, Albert Lamb: Books

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Amazon.com: The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work: Linda Darling-Hammond: Books

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John Dewey: Democracy and Education

online version

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Amazon.com: Experience And Education: John Dewey: Books

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Online Book Store v. 1.0 - What to Look for in a Classroom: And Other Essays

h/t Stager

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