Bibliomancer.Com

In junior high school, I took a lot of shop class. I had to take some­thing in the period. I had no artis­tic tal­ent to speak of, and enough atavis­tic sense that home ec was for girls that I spent one period a day doing some mechan­i­cal thing or another: Wood shop, metal shop, alter­na­tive energy (we made hot dog cook­ers!), mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing and so on. It was good, fun stuff and I was really glad I did it.

When I moved on to high school, I set it aside. Rather than being part of the cur­ricu­lum, shop was is own dis­tant wing of the school, vis­i­ble only occa­sion­ally from Gym or Driver’s ed. It wasn’t shop, it was “Voca­tional Edu­ca­tion” and the kids who went there didn’t over­lap much with my world. I was a power-nerd, on track with var­i­ous hon­ors classes, good tests and mediocre grades. My view of the uni­verse assumed there were var­i­ous tracks of aca­d­e­mic suc­cess, and over time I bought into the gen­eral idea that some­where below the low­est aca­d­e­mic track was Vo-tech (Vocational/technical edu­ca­tion), and I had the gen­eral sense that that was where kids ended up rather than drop­ping out of school. These were “the dumb kids”, trou­ble­mak­ers and smok­ers, the ones with­out real futures, unlike me and my hon­ors class compatriots.

Yes, I was a dumb, arro­gant, know-nothing snot-nosed brat. I know this. I’m also in the future.

This idea got smacked out of my head one night when I was at an awards cer­e­mony. I’d got­ten an NHS nom­i­na­tion (beat­ing out my fel­low power nerds, who had only got­ten the equiv­a­lent of hon­or­able men­tion) though the award was pretty much just for show since my grades were mid­dling at best. I hung around for the whole cer­e­mony to be polite, even when it came time to hand out the vo-tech awards.

I did not rec­og­nize the woman giv­ing out the awards – she might not have even been a teacher at the school, but given my dis­con­nect from vo-tech, who knows – but I remem­ber her twangy accent as she made a point of fully pro­nounc­ing “National Voca­tional Tech­ni­cal Honor Soci­ety” every time it came up, never short­en­ing or abbre­vi­at­ing it. I don’t remem­ber much of the specifics of what she said, but it caught me up short all the same. See, for most of the folks at this cer­e­mony, this was a lit­tle sideshow, a chance for the not-so-smart kids to be seen on the stage before we could go back to rec­og­niz­ing the best and brightest.

It was clear this woman knew that, and it was clear it made her angry as hell. And not angry because it’s what she did, angry because she was damn proud of these kids up on the stage and what they had done, and it meant less than noth­ing to most of the peo­ple watch­ing. She didn’t rant or any­thing. She just made a short state­ment about how these kids deserve respect, and she made sure that no part of the cer­e­mony was rushed or abbre­vi­ated. But that pride and anger shone through as clear as day, and it kind of knocked me on my ass.

There are few times in my life when I have so clearly seen what an utter dum­b­ass I’d been. That night pretty well upended my whole per­spec­tive on voca­tional edu­ca­tion. I stopped see­ing it as a safety net for losers and started rec­og­niz­ing it as some­thing valu­able, a path that some­one who knows what they’re doing can and should set their feet upon, and know they’re going to get some­where. Hell, com­pared to the vague plans that come form a four year degree, it was pos­i­tively enviable.

I men­tion all this because it gives a lit­tle con­text for how intensely dis­ap­pointed I was with the book Shop Class as Soul­craft. I had read the reviews and heard the inter­views and I was intensely excited about it. The premise was that there was value in real work, in learn­ing to do and make things with your hands, and that that had been lost and needed to be regained by our soci­ety. This res­onated really strongly with me, and I had hoped for a book that addressed it.

Instead, I get a book by and about a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy who gave up a think tank job to repair motor­cy­cles, and has now writ­ten a book for the sole pur­pose of jus­ti­fy­ing that deci­sion, and pos­si­bly air­ing a few of his favorite bits of pol­i­tics. It’s utterly dis­ap­point­ing, and I wrote a review to that effect, but I wanted to get down the rest of my frus­tra­tion, if only for myself.