Brilliant article. One of my favorite parts:
People are often amazed that I work on my own vehicles, work on the house (plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc) or perform a myriad of other tasks. My response is that for a society of such "smart" people, why doesn't anyone think anymore?
The Case for Working With Your Hands
High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.
People are often amazed that I work on my own vehicles, work on the house (plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc) or perform a myriad of other tasks. My response is that for a society of such "smart" people, why doesn't anyone think anymore?
The Case for Working With Your Hands