Is College Making Us Dumb?
I’ve been reading Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford for the last couple of weeks, and I can’t remember the last time I felt so ambivalent about a book. (Okay, I checked and it was 2005—Cool Memories by Jean Baudrillard, which alternately infuriated and impressed me.) Shop Class as Soulcraft is having a similar effect.
For example, passages like the following infuriate me:
So now, if you go to a Toyota dealership to look at a Scion (their cheaper, youth-oriented brand), you get a brochure full of pictures of crazy custom Scions, and profiles of the custom fabricators who have built them, typically with a welding helmet perched just so on their heads, and the obligatory wife beater.
And:
If different human types are attracted to different kinds of work, the converse is also true: the work a man does forms him.
I found this annoying sexist writing woven throughout the book.
On the other hand, he challenges some assumptions that many of us hold dear, and with very good reasoning. The one that stopped me in my tracks was higher education in general and advanced degrees in particular. Crawford’s criticism isn’t based on envy; he has a Ph.D. in political philosophy. He was the executive director of a think tank for a while, and is currently a motorcycle mechanic and also a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
I think what made him begin to question the value of higher education was his first job after getting his master’s degree: “My new job was to read articles in academic journals, index them under established categories, and write abstracts of about two hundred words.” For someone who loves to read and has a broad interest base, it sounds like a dream job.
But as it turns out, not so much. The job is based on the assumption that in writing an abstract, there is a method that merely needs to be applied. There is no need to actually understand the article. Doesn’t that seem a little odd? The starting quota was 15 articles a day. Indexed and abstracted. Before he had been there a year, the quota was up to 28.
Twenty-eight.
That’s a lot of abstracts. I would be pleased as punch if I could index and abstract five academic articles in one day.
Crawford found that meeting the quota “required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus.” Seriously, a good academic article can take hours to read and fully 
understand. (A bad one can take even longer.)
He questions the increasing educational credentials many employers require—often without evidence that the additional education will make them better at those jobs. He references a study of air traffic controllers—a job requiring complex decision making—which found an inverse correlation between educational achievement and job performance. Seriously. Think about that.
And that is why I am enjoying this book. It makes me think. It causes me to question some of my assumptions.
And that is one of my definitions of an excellent book.
Good post. College is getting increasingly expensive even as employers demand that applicants have more and more education on their resumes in order to do jobs that, for all practical purposes, don’t necessarily require a four-year degree to perform at them effectively. I’ve spoken with temps, part-timers and entry-level folks in other industries who say they have more skills than their supervisor but can’t get a promotion — or even a full-time position with the company — because they don’t have a Master’s.
The only thing I’m confused about is the top where you call some of the author’s writing sexist. What’s sexist about it? I haven’t read the book so maybe you’ve found some compelling evidence, but the examples you provide don’t strike me as degrading toward women. A “wifebeater” is a type of shirt well-known in the lexicon; if anything, he seems to be critiquing the marketing material in the catalog and its ability to sell cars through images of muscle men at work. As for the phrase “the work a man does forms him”… If he had said, “the work a man or woman does forms them,” would it then be more acceptable to you? If he had said, “the work a woman does forms her,” would that have been better? “Man” can be used as a general stand-in for both sexes, as in “mankind” or “since the dawn of man…” Seems a weird, nitpicky thing to harp on….
I realize that wifebeater is well-known, but I still find it offensive. To make sure it wasn’t just me, I did a mini-survey of coworkers (n = 4) to see if they also found it offensive and sexist, which they did (although one found it more classist than sexist). As for the generic male, it still bothers me, particularly when it is used exclusively or almost exclusively. Perhaps I am being nitpicky but it wore me down as I progressed through the book. (Though it certainly didn’t stop me from reading!)