Shop Talk

In previous posts on the Farm, I've outlined my fondness for William Morris's philosophy of work and the dichotomy he saw between useful work and useless toil. I'm also an advocate of experiential education, the education of the whole person (as opposed to the education of the intellect alone), and (again inspired by Morris), the education of desire--which lies at the very core of my views on the environment and sustainability.

Last week on the Colbert Report, one of the guests was Matthew Crawford, a contributing editor for The New Atlantis and author of a rather intriguing book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. I'm already thinking, without having actually read the book (it was preceded by an essay of the same name in The New Atlantis, which I have read), that Morris would love it. And its premise, that doing things is every bit as important intellectually as talking about them, is enough to make me a fan for life. After all, my own little-read tome, More News From Nowhere, describes a society built on both doing and thinking, and fosters a kind of organic education that involves both the concrete and the abstract.

Some of my students may recall our conversations about the Bauhaus, and my arguments against the separation of art and craft. The Bauhaus, after all, combined a Foundation Course in theory (including material on the study of nature and the study of materials) followed by workshops under the tutelage of craftsmen and artists that put theory into practice.

I was personally affected by the American predilection for "tracking" students in elementary and secondary schools when I returned to the States in time for high school. "Smart" kids were put onto a college prep track, and "the others" were channeled into vocational studies. What that meant for me was no home ec, no art classes, no shop classes. Only academic studies. The one time I managed to break out of the mold was when I was a Junior and talked somebody into letting me take a typing class because I argued that it would help me write papers in college.

As it was set up, tracking was overall a bad model and led to a system of inequality that still exists. What seems to have sprung up in its stead (probably in an effort to address issues of "classism" in the seventies) is another bastardization of educational management: the idea that everybody can and should go to college. Now, I'm all for equal opportunity, but what if somebody really wants to spend the rest of his or her life building cars or airplanes or houses? Of course, one can argue that educated citizens make better construction workers--but why do they have to go to college to "get educated"? Especially if these folks are going to sit and stare at their philosophy teacher with the standard "why the hell do I have to take this class" look on their faces.

Matthew Crawford points to the origins of the problem in his interview on the Colbert show, where he spoke of the "pernicious and long history of tracking into vocational and college prep" courses, based on the "dichotomy between mental vs. manual" education--which in turn is based on a perception that "knowledge work" is better than manual work. Somehow, along the line, vocational training got a bad rap, and "knowledge work" took on an elitist mantle.

The idea that four-year colleges are necessary for future success in any field is just bogus. Community colleges or technical schools that provide continuing education in basic subjects like writing, maths, and general science can foster cultural literacy, leaving more of the time students would need for practical education on how to fight fires, build homes, or arrest felons.

I'm actually a product of the basic prejudice, as the first member of my working-class family to finish college, and I've resented the fact that, as a "smart" kid, I was channeled along paths I might not have taken. Many of my generation (cousins and siblings) followed me along the college route, but ended up in rather more practical professions: nursing and civil engineering. I don't regret the emphasis on intellectual pursuits, nor even the "impracticality" of studying Classics, archaeology, and philosophy. But the emphasis on preparing myself for a purely intellectual career sidetracked me from art and design, and it was only jobs that involved developing design skills that provided the needed education. Tracking backfired and probably started me down the path toward my present anarchic stance on education.

Now, of course, I live in the best of both worlds--for me. I get to teach history and philosophy to design students, and am constantly learning to combine the intellectual with the practical. But the lingering effects of valorizing the former over the latter can be seen in recent debates among my colleagues about how we should teach our students. Some have been educated in environments that lack the structure vocational training maintains, and would prefer to inspire their students to creativity without the strictures of formal lesson plans--and the debate will continue as long as the dichotomy survives.

On the other hand, I've been inspired to focus more carefully on Morris and the Bauhaus in my history classes, in order to emphasize a different history: one in which "knowledge" isn't confined to an intellectual model, but pervades learning in both the physical and mental realms.

Since I frequently have to address the question, "what does this have to do with becoming a graphic designer?" (or a fashion designer or a filmmaker or a web guy), my response usually has something to do with "knowing what's in the box" (and I'm getting rather weary of my own version of the box cliche) I'm actually pretty good at convincing design students that knowing about art history is a valuable adjunct to creativity (if for no other reason than showing them what's been done before). But I'm not sure how we're going to keep educating people in the classics anyway, now that popular culture is hell-bent on denigrating intelligence and shortening attention spans.

As literature and the performing arts continue to lean toward the lowest common denominator, the endurance of any kind of canon is in question. We may need to turn to something like John Ruskin's Working Men's College (which still exists in London) to provide continuing education beyond the fulfillment of vocational requirements--were we to begin paying attention to the training needs of the people who do some of the most important work around. After all, where would most of the folks in Dallas be had there not been electricians to repair downed lines after the last whopping thunderstorm? I strongly suspect that the intellectual vacuum created by reality TV and inane movies will eventually drive at least some of our future plumbers and such to seek intellectual stimulation, on their own terms, just as the workers of nineteenth-century London eagerly took advantage of Ruskin's drawing classes.

I think this issue is well worth pursuing in later posts, so this is by no means my final take. For related earlier comments on Owl's Farm, see the links to the right, and stay tuned for further ruminations.

Image credits: "Workshop" by Felipe Micaroni Lalli; Bauhaus image by Jim Hood; John Ruskin, self portrait, watercolour touched with bodycolour over pencil, all from Wikimedia Commons.Ruskin.jpg

The Home School Alternative

I've written a great deal over the years about education, and although I am by profession a college teacher, I am profoundly concerned about how young children are taught in this country. After having struggled through elementary and secondary schooling for my own children, and using band-aid solutions to the problems I didn't know enough to figure out how to solve then, I finally (in the '80s) discovered William Morris. I'd already encountered the legendary John Holt, and had suggested to my teenage daughter that she simply drop out of school and we'd get educated together, but she was already too well ensconced in the American high school experience to want to leave her friends "behind."

For the most part, though, she'd made her own way, even in high school. She didn't participate in any organized extra-curricular activities that I can remember, preferring instead to get a job and take responsibility for her own economic education. After a disastrous first semester in college, she quit to work at data entry and took courses part-time at a junior colleges until she had begun to build a career as a crackerjack administrative assistant for a home-building company's information technology division, and then decided to earn a BFA in interior design. I'm immeasurably proud of her, because her choices were all hers--not those of a system which seems to be designed to turn out mediocre workers in a consumer society.

If I had it to do all over again, I'd have schooled both of my kids at home. Although there are alternatives available (such as Montessori, and both of my children went to Montessori schools during their pre-public school days), they're usually very expensive and frequently have waiting lists. And as more and more wealthy parents discover the richness of these curricula, the population of these schools becomes more and more uniform: upper middle class and monochromatic.

Home-schooling has become the refuge of strongly religious parents who fear the corrupting influences of popular culture on their children, and I can't say that I blame them. I drove by a high school this week, where youngsters were gathering for orientation outside of a gym, and quite frankly it looked like a convention of underage hookers and their pimps. The girls were barely dressed (it is, after all, summer in Texas), and the boys were tricked out in very expensive jeans and rock-star shirts. A fleeting memory of school uniforms made me sigh, and I drove on.

But uniforms aren't the answer either. They offer an egalitarian solution to economic disparity in some school populations--but it didn't work in the Catholic school I went to. We purchased the material for our uniforms and had them made--and rich girls had deeper pleats (that didn't fall out and look scruffy halfway through the day) because their parents could afford extra fabric, or better tailors. Uniforms also promote a vaguely military sensibility, and perhaps they do limit the development of imagination. However, the girls I saw in front of the high school were each wearing slightly different versions of the same "uniform" anyway: tight jeans, skimpy baby-doll tops and multiple underwear straps, set off by a small variety of shoulder bag styles.

The United States seems to possess an almost schizophrenic notion of childhood. Young children need to be both over-stimulated and over-protected. "Young adults" need to be initiated into consumer culture and visually sexualized, but must also stay chaste until marriage. No wonder so many people want to pull the plug on public education and seek an alternative.

The good news is that with the development of the internet and the proliferation of excellent educational websites, coupled with growing educational opportunities in public institutions, parents have a raft of resources available to them. It's quite possible for well-educated parents to develop their own curricula and augment them with informal classes in art museums and nature centers. Many regional museums have also developed educational websites with suggested activities and, occasionally online courses. Universities like MIT are making college courseware available online, and bright kids everywhere seem to be taking advantage of it.

Parents who are less well-prepared to create their own lessons can now take advantage of a multitude of curricula available through growing home-school networks and websites. Some of these have a decidedly limited framework, but many encourage the kind of wide-ranging exploration that highly creative parents seek.

Children who stay home also have time to engage in the most educational activity of all: reading. Combined with regular physical activity out of doors, such as nature hikes and gardening, home-schoolers can learn the way our ancestors did. Not constrained by standardized tests that stifle creativity, home-schoolers have the opportunity to learn art and music, to explore the nature of mathematics instead of engaging in the rote memorization of formulas. If kids don't have to spend half their day going to and from school and to and from classes within the school building, they can read, or learn about germinating seeds, or create a blog (!), or practice the piano--or choose from any number of activities that will educate them far better than sitting in a classroom with thirty other children, preparing for a high-stakes exam that will teach them exactly nothing except how to memorize information without having digested it properly first.

One of the main arguments against home-schooling is that kids won't get properly socialized. My response to that is socialized into what? Early sexualization? Rabid consumerism? Classism? Racism? Bullying?

In the nineteenth century, William Morris decried the institutionalism of British public (i.e. private) education, and the degeneration of boarding schools into "boy farms." We haven't come much further than that in our public schools, where kids are squeezed into patterns of expectation, and are "educated" primarily by their peers. Do we really want our country to be led eventually by a generation who spent their school years penned into a room with a single adult as a model? Why not teach our children by example? They can surely be better socialized by spending high-quality time interacting with intelligent adults, rather than letting their chums "teach" them about birds, bees, life, the universe, and everything.

My own childhood was hardly idyllic, but my fondest memories involve large amounts of time spent with my parents and their friends. Being taken to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Taipei for lunch, or accompanying a group of adults to a local lake for a day of swimming and conversation were common occurrences, and taught me that adults really do enjoy conversing with children who have grown up being treated like reasonable human beings. And when we weren't interacting with adults, my brother and I had the opportunity to explore our surroundings on our own; when we were really stumped for something to do, we'd put on elaborate plays and pretend to be everything from Arthurian knights to samurais to children in Enid Blyton stories. Of course, we could only do these things because we'd read the books that gave us the ideas in the first place. Perhaps the best part of our growing up is that we didn't have access to television until we were teenagers. Now, there's an idea . . . .

And so, for my friends Sheryl and Jenny, who have been or are beginning to home-school their children, you have my deepest admiration for your imagination and your courage. You give me hope when there frequently seems little to be hopeful about. And for you I'll continue to post information and resources on home schooling when I find them in my own unending search for ways to develop a truly humane (and human) way to help our children survive difficult times and craft a better future.

Image credits: James Tissot, "A Little Nimrod," and a little girl reading by Jessie Wilcox Smith, both from Wikimedia Commons.