Shop Class as Soulcraft summary

Most people were raised with the knowledge that earning a college degree was their ticket to a comfortable, well-paying job. Unfortunately, this expectation is being broken for people everyday. That’s because a successful career is increasingly determined by criteria other than educational level.

According to the economist Alan Blinder, the so-called gap between educated and less-educated people is shrinking. Blinder predicts that, in the future, a more obvious distinction will be between people doing jobs that can be executed via the internet versus those that can’t. Only people doing work that requires face-to-face interaction will be able to count on a stable career, such as doctors or other people who provide an in-person service. Because, as Blinder says, “You can’t hammer a nail over the internet.”

Even if you’ve never had a factory job, it’s easy to imagine how mind-numbing work on an assembly line could be. After all, spending eight hours a day tightening bolts is a sure route to boredom.

Over the last hundred years or so, a marked division of labor was drawn that took the intellectual component out of many jobs. The first result was the degradation of blue-collar work.

Did you know that manual trades are now looked down upon by most schools? Shop classes have been slashed over the last 20 years, as educators fear that students working with tools and their hands will distract them from their real goal: becoming knowledge workers.

In fact, many schools actively discourage students from choosing a career in the trades, instead urging them to focus on becoming knowledge workers. Although the latter is more likely to be the route to a lifetime of job insecurity, educators are still inclined to prepare their students for theoretically oriented jobs.

After the author earned his master’s in philosophy, he became a knowledge worker, joining a company called Information Access Company where he read academic articles, indexed them and wrote short abstracts that the company sold to libraries. But the author wasn’t happy.

He, like many knowledge workers today, encountered working conditions worse than most manual laborers. That’s because, just like assembly-line workers, many knowledge workers are put under extreme pressure to meet deadlines.

Humans have been cooperating forever, but the idea of teamwork among knowledge workers dates back to the 1970s. It was during this decade that people began standing up to the idea that one person should dominate their coworkers. The result was teamwork, a tool that empowers all employees to participate in workplace decisions.

Unfortunately, teamwork isn’t as empowering as people claim it is. That’s because the members of a team are judged based on their individual behavior, but in a team of knowledge workers, it’s hard to see the influence of any one individual team member.

For a lot of people, work is just a means to an end – a way to do all the leisurely activities they would be doing all the time if they weren’t working. For instance, a well-respected financial analyst works grueling hours on Wall Street for months on end so he can finally climb Mount Everest during his two weeks of vacation.

What’s the problem with this lifestyle?

Wouldn’t it be exhilarating to work in a think tank where you tackled complex and exciting problems all day, every day? Well, in the author’s experience, it can actually leave you oddly unsatisfied. In fact, he was so unfulfilled working at a think thank that he left to become a motorcycle mechanic, a job he loves.

Why?

It’s commonly assumed that manual labor is just for those who are better with their hands than their minds. But that’s absolute nonsense. In fact, the trades tax a worker’s brain just as much as your typical knowledge work.

That’s because to excel in a manual trade you have to pay careful attention to the physical world and understand how it functions. For example, by practicing his craft, a carpenter becomes an expert in countless types of wood by observing their resilience through different weather and myriad other changes.