Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B Crawford

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B Crawford

Shop Class as Soulcraft brings alive an experience that was once quite common but now seems to be receding from society -- the experience of making and fixing things with our hands. Those of us who sit in an office often feel a lack of connection to the material world, a sense of loss, and find it difficult to say exactly what we do all day. For those who felt hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, Shop Class as Soulcraft seeks to restore the honor of the manual trades as a life worth choosing. On both economic and psychological grounds, Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a knowledge worker, based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing, the work of the hand from that of the mind. Crawford shows us how such a partition, which began a century ago with the assembly line, degrades work for those on both sides of the divide. But Crawford offers good news as well: The manual trades are very different from the assembly line and from dumbed-down white collar work as well. They require careful thinking and are punctuated by moments of genuine pleasure. Based on his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford makes a case for the intrinsic satisfactions and cognitive challenges of manual work. The work of builders and mechanics is secure; it cannot be outsourced, and it cannot be made obsolete. Such work ties us to the local communities in which we live and instills the pride that comes from doing work that is genuinely useful. A wholly original debut, Shop Class as Soulcraft offers a passionate call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.

Crawford, Matthew B.: -

Matthew B. Crawford is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head. He is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He earned a PhD in Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago, specializing in ancient political thought; he majored in physics as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. Crawford has been working on cars since the age of fifteen and currently drives a 1970 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780143117469
ISBN 10	0143117467
Title	Shop Class as Soulcraft
Author	Matthew B Crawford
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2010-04-27
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.