Real work

Every June, my extended family gets together for three days. As many as 60 of us children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Ira and Ruth Good travel from Las Vegas, Kansas City, Boston, and Lancaster to a Mennonite camp north of Harrisburg, Pa.

During those shared three days, we eat, play lots of soccer, tell stories, catch up on each others' lives, and have a book discussion. As one of the few Goods who is not athletically inclined, I generally skip the soccer and head straight for the book group. This year, we read Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford. Crawford is a "philosopher/mechanic." He currently serves as a fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is also an independent motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va.

"Shop Class as Soulcraft is a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America," wrote the New York Times in a glowing review of the book. Released as the economic crisis took hold, Shop Craft is a call to reconsider the path that has led many of us from college to white-collar office work and to instead embrace the hard work of those skills often celebrated in high school shop classes, the manual trades of plumbing, electrical work and furniture-making.

For my family, working with our hands is not a distant memory, but only a step or two removed from our current professions. Ruth and Ira Good's boys, all seven of them, learned how to work hard at a very young age. The children of a preacher/farmer and his wife, both of whom dropped out of school after the eighth grade, they were taught that doing manual work well was a high value.

But in a generation, that idea of work changed in my family. We moved from valuing the hands-on work of farming to embracing the mental work of our education and white-collar jobs wholeheartedly. My father was the first person in his family to graduate from high school. He went on to college and then graduate school, as did his brothers. They became professionals: a psychologist, a therapist, a teacher, a bishop, and a vice president for a Mennonite institution, and so on. My Uncle Leon who spent most of his life as a high-school science teacher and farmer, lives on the family farm.

My generation has mostly followed the professional path, too. We are teachers, researchers, engineers, and doctors. I think that all of us would say that we've gained a lot from our educations. We live comfortable lives and, on the whole, enjoy our jobs.

But what have we lost? I can only speak for myself, but many of Crawford's points resonate with me. Certainly, I often overlook the importance of the jobs Crawford celebrates, such as plumbing, electrical work, and mechanical repair. I forget how much hard work, both physical and cognitive, goes into repairing a broken pipe or an engine until I need to fix one or the other and realize that I don't know how to begin. Even then, it’s easy for me to assume that successfully fixing the plumbing is more about brute force than skill and knowledge.

I also make the mistake of being too charmed by someone else's fancy education. The product of Mennonite and state schools, I'm a little starstruck around anyone who has gone to an Ivy League school. I easily assume someone has a great deal of wisdom and life experience when I discover they’ve graduated from Harvard or Yale, even though I learned a long time ago that a degree from an Ivy doesn't mean someone's particularly interesting, wise, or funny.

Crawford's book also reminds me of how truly fortunate I am. I have a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, one of those completely unhirable degrees with a fairly useless skill set. I should have ended up in an office job working as a "knowledge worker" or "symbolic analyst," the dull equivalent of a white-collar factory job where I have no real connection to the work I’m doing. Instead, I work in a publishing job where I get to see a book through conception to completion. My job is a gift because I have something at stake with each project I work on.

I don't know how much the rest of my family enjoyed Crawford's book, but I really did. I learned a lot. I will do a better job at honoring the work that my grandparents did and giving thanks for the job I have. And I will encourage anyone I know who's thinking about a career change to consider the intellectual pursuits of plumbing or electrical work. Seriously.

Kate Good lives in Lancaster City, Pa.  She is a member of Blossom Hill Mennonite Church, Lancaster. She is assistant publisher at Good Books.

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