clipped from: www.ft.com   

Why manual labour is making a comeback

“Shop class” is the American term for technical studies courses at secondary schools – classes that are fast disappearing from US curricula. The book is a protest against that sort of development – against white-collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it. Crawford, who has a PhD in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual labour. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, intellectually and financially satisfying than the information-processing jobs for which students are typically prepared.

Crawford’s metaphor is not the journey but the journeyman, the tradesman who makes his way using knowledge he has acquired from coping with physical materials. “A carpenter faces the accusation of his level, an electrician the question whether the lights are in fact on,” he writes. “Such standards have a universal validity.”