Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Struggling in Shop Class. Again.

I am a poster child for Matthew B. Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft.  I haven't taken a shop class since eighth grade.  And I wasn't particularly good at it.  Shop class for me was a series of lessons in the depths of incompetence.  My little plastic picture frame had bubbles in it from where I heated it too quickly when bending and shaping it.  Sewing in home economics class wasn't much better.  I could never keep even pressure on the little "pressure foot" that ran the sewing machine.  It either crept along or raced as I tried to keep one eye on the thread that inevitably tangled and another on the clock in the twenty minutes we had to complete the entire project.  I had twenty minutes because I'd spent the previous two weeks trying to thread the bobbin on the sewing machine.  Seriously, those projects were bad.  My sixth grade telephone pillow, tragically understuffed, resembled a giant pink and black clutch purse.  And we won't talk about the hot pink and white polka dotted ensemble I "assembled" for our eighth grade sewing  unit.

So go figure that in my early twenties I took up knitting, have produced several complex projects including actual apparel that has been worn outside the house, and am considering taking a class in, what else, sewing. So much for "I was an eighth grade home ec. failure"

Matthew Crawford has an answer for this.  He argues that people's interest in making their own clothes, growing their own food, and building their own decks is because of their desire to bring things closer to home:
We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it.  This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home.  Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the global economy.    
But there's a big difference between enjoying completing a home improvement project like installing a deck and building a house.  Likewise, a difference between knitting a sweater and making all of one's clothes.   I prefer Crawford's other point which is stated in the book's subtitle:  "An inquiry into the value of work."  I'll have more to say after I finish the book.  In the meantime,  I'd love to hear your opinions about the value of trades, blue collar versus white collar work and home improvement projects, dear readers. 

 

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