Matt Crawford Says Go Ahead, Get Your Hands Dirty

Matthew Crawford reads from his book Shop Class as Soulcraft at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, June 8, at the Elliott Bay Book Company.

Imagine you write a book and it gets published, and so there you are skimming the New York Times one day and Francis Fukuyama is reviewing your book. Francis Fucking Fukuyama! And he likes it: "a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America," he says.

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft is a peculiarly engaging read--it's a polemic about the necessity for self-directed work, an "I did it my way" memoir about a political science Ph.D. who resigned from a thinktank to fix motorcycles, and an illuminating critique of the "knowledge worker" paradise. Probably because of the motorcycle repair, it's getting comparisons to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but Crawford is equally happy to tackle the after-effects of Taylorism and Druckerism, too.

Crawford casts a jaundiced eye on the practice of "upskilling" everyone to become knowledge workers--for one thing, society needs people who know how to make (and fix) things. Plenty of occupations remain that can't be outsourced--no one in India or China can replace your basement's leaky pipes. But Crawford also draws a distinction between the managerial cubicle worker who devotes their efforts to team performance, and the kind of person who needs to see their accomplishment to feel rewarded by work. A month's uptick on a graph doesn't fill them with pride the same way.

His focus on the rewards of working with your hands is an interesting one, because it turns preconceptions about the social status of work on their head. We asked him about that.

When people first hear about your book, they might think, "Okay, we get it, the stoners need shop class." But you're not talking about that. You're not sorting people into book-smart and non-book-smart piles. Still, how would you console a parent whose full-of-potential kid read your book and decided to forgo academia for learning a trade?

I taught high shool Latin part-time for a year at a public high school. Maybe one kid out of 30 had a real interest in the language; the rest had been told they had to take it to get their SAT scores up. Some of these kids had flunked out of first year Spanish. The SAT-boosting rationale doesn't generate real engagement, and unless you're extremely disciplined it can't sustain the kind of effort it takes to memorize Latin noun declensions.

I think there are a lot of kids, including some who are very smart, who would rather be learning to build things or fix things. It's a natural human desire. I'm certain that if I could have taken a few of those students aside and said, "Hey, let's build a deck together," or "Let's rebuild this engine," they would have perked right up. Mabe they wouldn't have needed quite so much Ritalin.

So it's a question of what sparks that love of learning. The tragedy is that someone who goes to college because he feels he has to, earns Bs and Cs, and then goes on to be, let's say, a mediocre accountant--well, that same guy might have been a crack mechanic or electrician, and be more engaged in what he's doing. So I think we need to take a broader view of what a good job looks like, and stop trying to hustle everybody into a single track, as though there's only one path to success.