Shop Class as Soulcraft Quotes

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: "All human beings by nature desire to know.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“We're not as free and independent as we thought. Street-level work that disrupts the infrastructure (the sewer system below or the electrical grid above) brings our shared dependence into view. People may inhabit very different worlds even in the same city, according to their wealth or poverty. Yet we all live in the same physical reality, ultimately, and owe a common debt to the world.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“There is a classic psychology experiment that seems to confirm Brewer's point. Children who enjoy drawing were given marker pens and allowed to go at it. Some were rewarded for drawing (they were given a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon, and told ahead of time about this arrangement, whereas for others the issue of rewards was never raised. Weeks later, those who had been rewarded took less interest in drawing, and their drawings were judged to be lower in quality, whereas those who had not been rewarded continued to enjoy the activity and produced higher-quality drawings. The hypothesis is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it. That is, an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a world that is of our making.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“...if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life. This understanding may be hard to articulate; bringing it more fully into view is the task of moral inquiry. Such inquiry may be helped along by practical activities in company with others, a sort of conversation in deed. In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“I used to try to hypnotize myself into a Zen-like state of resignation at the outset. It doesn't work, not for this grasshopper. I have my own process, as they say. I call it the motherfucker process.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“...an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, and interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling. A similar effect may account for the familiar fact that when someone turns his hobby into a business, he often loses pleasure in it. Likewise, an intellectual who pursues an academic career gets professionalized, and this may lead him to stop thinking. This line of reasoning suggests that the kind of appreciative attention where one remains focused on what one is doing can arise only in leisure activities. Such a conclusion would put pleasurable absorption beyond the ken of any activity that is undertaken for the sake of making money, because although money is undoubtedly good, it is not intrinsically so.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“you can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“When the maker's (or fixer's) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn't separate from its internal or "engineering" standards; the work is improved through relationships with others. It may even be the case that what those standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through these iterated exchanges with others who use the product, as well as other craftsmen in the same trade. Through work that had this social character, some shared conception of the good is lit up, and becomes concrete.”
― Matthew B Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

“Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our relationship to our own stuff: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves replacing an entire system because some minute component has failed.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“The lover of excellence is prone to being drawn out of himself, erotically almost, in a way that the universalist egalitarian is not. The latter's empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is more principled than attentive. It is similar to bad art and mathematical shoelaces, in this regard; it is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“For humans, tools point to the necessity of moral inquiry. Because nature makes only ambiguous prescriptions for us, we are compelled to ask, what is good? If you give a young boy a hammer for the first time and watch his face, you will see an awareness of this burden dawning on him (as he turns to the cat, for example).”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“I did not even look at the scoreboard when my routine was done in 1976. My teammates started pointing because there was this uproar" (Nadia Comaneci). These remarks highlight an important feature of those practices that entail skilled and active engagement: one's attention is focused on standards intrinsic to the practice, rather than external goods that may be won through the practice, typically money or recognition. Can this distinction between internal and external goods inform our understanding of work?”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“What is it that we really want for a young person when we give him or her vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: “knowing that,” as opposed to “knowing how.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“The truth about idiocy... is that it is at once an ethical and cognitive failure... The Greek idios means 'private,' and idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role... This still comes across in the related English words 'idiomatic' and 'idiosyncratic,' which similarly suggest self-enclosure... At the bottom, the idiot is a solipsist.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry , through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces. We worry that we are becoming stupider, an begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of "credit", shot through with bad faith, [the mortgage broker's] work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the general rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“When Jessica DuLong describes her work in the engine room of the John J. Harvey, you can practically feel the throb of the boat’s mighty diesels. This is someone who has paid some dues, and it shows in the details. "My River Chronicles" explores the dignity of work, offering an account of what made this country thrive, and might yet again: men and women who aren’t content to stand around with their hands in their pockets. The book reeks of penetrating oil which may be just what is needed to get our economy, and our culture, moving again.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“In schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged. —A CERTAIN SHOP TEACHER WHOSE NAME I HAVE LOST”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work