A poster in a political page I follow shared an article about vocational training today. It fits into the on-going story line regarding the lack of trades-skilled workers, the educational shift away from anything “manual,” and the long-running and starting-to-look-suspect “conventional wisdom” that everyone should get a college degree because it will provide a better life. Mike Rowe, of the television series “Dirty Jobs,” has been waging a long campaign to re-establish the mindset that physical work is not a bad thing, via his mikeroweWORKS foundation (I’ve written before about Mike Rowe, the joys of working, and the surprising career paths that one’s life can take).
The poster mentioned that 600,000 welders will be retiring from the workforce in the next 2-4 years, and that there aren’t people in the pipeline to fill those positions.
All this reminded me of a scene from the TV series Breaking Bad:
Group Leader: Jesse, last time, you seemed down about your job at the Laundromat. Let me ask something, if you had the chance to do anything you wanted, what would you do?
Jesse Pinkman: Make more green, man. A lot more.
Group Leader: Forget about money. Assume you have all you want.
Jesse Pinkman: I don’t know. I guess I would make something.
Group Leader: Like what?
Jesse Pinkman: I don’t know if it even matters, but… work with my hands, I guess.
Group Leader: Building things, like carpentry or bricklaying or something?
Jesse Pinkman: I took this vo-tech class in high school, woodworking. I took a lot of vo-tech classes, because it was just big jerk-off, but this one time I had this teacher by the name of… Mr… Mr. Pike. I guess he was like a Marine or something before he got old. He was hard hearing. My project for his class was to make this wooden box. You know, like a small, just like a… like a box, you know, to put stuff in. So I wanted to get the thing done as fast as possible. I figured I could cut classes for the rest of the semester and he couldn’t flunk me as long as I, you know, made the thing. So I finished it in a couple days. And it looked pretty lame, but it worked. You know, for putting in or whatnot. So when I showed it to Mr. Pike for my grade, he looked at it and said: “Is that the best you can do?” At first I thought to myself “Hell yeah, bitch. Now give me a D and shut up so I can go blaze one with my boys.” I don’t know. Maybe it was the way he said it, but… it was like he wasn’t exactly saying it sucked. He was just asking me honestly, “Is that all you got?” And for some reason, I thought to myself: “Yeah, man, I can do better.” So I started from scratch. I made another, then another. And by the end of the semester, by like box number five, I had built this thing. You should have seen it. It was insane. I mean, I built it out of Peruvian walnut with inlaid zebrawood. It was fitted with pegs, no screws. I sanded it for days, until it was smooth as glass. Then I rubbed all the wood with tung oil so it was rich and dark. It even smelled good. You know, you put nose in it and breathed in, it was… it was perfect.
I went to a private college prep school from grades 6-12. The curriculum at the time included all that one would expect from such a school. It also included wood shop, something that might seem very out of place to someone today. It is in wood shop where I learned some manual skills, where I learned some valuable life lessons, and where I discovered that there’s deep satisfaction in making or doing things with my hands. Wood shop laid certain foundations: use of tools, basic elements of design, that design must incorporate fabrication, and the concept of a “process.” It also inculcated the idea of the “achievement.” Today, even something as simple as mowing my lawn gives me a good feeling when the job is done and I can survey what I have accomplished.
As our economy has shifted from agrarian to industrial to service, and as more and more of the jobs we do produce less tangible products, I suspect that the satisfaction one feels from the production of a real and (sometimes literally) concrete thing hasn’t quite carried through. In the 1970s movie Breaking Away, the protagonist and his father were walking around the local college campus. The father, a retired stonecutter, talked about the pride he felt walking around those big stone buildings, knowing that he had a hand in their creation. Pride, much maligned and one of the Seven Deadly Sins, sometimes gets a bum rap. The genuine, internalized pride that comes from a job well done or a well-executed crafting should be embraced, not bemoaned.
Unfortunately, pop culture doesn’t help matters. About the only place we see positive portrayals of tradesmen are in home improvement shows like This Old House and Holmes on Homes (where the tradesmen are “skilled others” rather than “average joes”), and in commercials for The Home Depot and for pickup trucks. On the flip side, the manually incompetent husband or father is an all-too-common trope on television shows and commercials, especially when he can be played against a tolerant and long-suffering wife or girlfriend. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom that a college degree is the path to greater success is persistent, despite both the changing employment landscape and the enormous disparity in utility and career prospects among the spectrum of degree options. Certainly, a STEM degree is highly likely to land a graduate a good job, but how many well-paying jobs are there for gender studies or comparative basket weaving techniques majors?
The liberal arts have a long and storied history as the path to being a well-rounded person, but so do the manual arts, and a truly well-rounded individual should not embrace one and ignore the other. Sadly, that seems to be the current state of education, with trades all-but-abolished from general study curricula and relegated instead to increasingly out-of-favor vocational schools. While one does not need a formal education to learn how to swing a hammer or turn a wrench, there are core skills that can and should be taught, just as we teach core skills in mathematics, sciences, grammar, etc.
Jesse eventually traded that Peruvian walnut and zebrawood box for an ounce of weed. He didn’t trade away the impression that Mr. Pike made on him, nor did he trade away the satisfaction and memory of making that box. That satisfaction is internal. It’s enough to acknowledge to one’s self that “I made this and I did a good job.” It’s more powerful than any accolade or pat on the back. When rooted in honesty, in saying to one’s self “I did this, I put my best effort into this, and it’s good,” it can be the best feeling in the world.
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