Matthew B. Crawford Discusses
Shop Class as Soulcraft

Shop class, once a rite of passage, has all but disappeared from mainstream education. Instead of studying the manual arts, students are funneled into careers as “knowledge workers” — careers that, ironically, are sometimes less cognitively demanding than the work of a mechanic.

This educational imperative is based on a separation of thinking from doing — a misguided partition between hand and mind that can be traced to the rise of the assembly line a century ago.

In his new book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, New Atlantis contributing editor Matthew B. Crawford casts a critical eye at both the assembly line and dumbed-down white collar work, and makes case for the manual trades. They require careful thinking and are punctuated by moments of genuine pleasure; they cannot be outsourced or made obsolete; they tie us to the local communities in which we live; and they instill the pride that comes from doing genuinely useful work.

Mr. Crawford has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He also has a small business repairing motorcycles in Richmond, Virginia.