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Jewish World Review June 2, 2009 / 10 Sivan 5769 The soft bigotry of high expectations By Rod Dreher http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | As the cost of a college degree spirals upward, The Chronicle of Higher Education anticipates that fewer young Americans will be going to universities, which have priced themselves out of the market. Write Joseph M. Cronin and Howard E. Horton, "There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering." That's good news. The idea that everybody ought to go to college is misguided at best and damaging at worst. It's a middle-class shibboleth that is overdue for debunking. There's a practical case against the college push. Only about 60 percent of Americans who enter a four-year college graduate with a degree within six years — a rate that has been consistent for three decades, according to the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit reform group. The organization advocates for higher graduation rates, which is admirable. But this assumes that everyone is equally capable of succeeding in college and that college is the right choice for everyone. Not so, says Tom Pauken, head of the Texas Workforce Commission, who thinks that given the dismal college graduation rates, high school seniors who struggle academically should not allow themselves to be pushed into college. Says Pauken: "They'd be better off trying to become more self-sufficient and developing a skilled trade, something portable they can take with them but can also make a real living doing. As a plumber, electrician and so forth, there's still a way to make a good living, even in tough economic times." Matthew B. Crawford understands the protection that tradesmen have in the global market. "If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help," he writes. "Because they are in China." BUY THE BOOK … at a discount by clicking HERE. Crawford makes a philosophical case for choosing the trades over college in his brilliant new book, Shop Class as Soul Craft, which launches an intellectually formidable attack on the way our culture has come to devalue manual labor. This bracingly countercultural book, written by a scholar who left white-collar work to open a motorcycle repair shop, defiantly rejects received wisdom about the meaning of work in America today. Crawford, a University of Chicago-trained philosopher, offers an account for why "work that is straightforwardly useful can also be intellectually absorbing." He explains why work as a skilled manual laborer is far more intellectually engaging than many may suppose because it entails "a systematic encounter with the material world." As its title suggests, the book is not really a career guide, but rather a philosophical inquiry into why so many of us are dissatisfied with our work. We have come to see labor as something we do in exchange for money and not as an expression of our intrinsic nature. Many a white-collar man works hard but lives in a world of soul-killing abstraction, where what he does, what he feels and who he is have little to do with one another. "The work cannot sustain him as a human being," Crawford writes. "Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it become imperative to partition work off from the rest of life." We have constructed an economy and a society based on the idea that work has no essential relation to human nature, and thus to human flourishing and human happiness. A good society, says Crawford (after Aristotle), is one in which men and women are free to pursue excellence, according to their individual natures. It's not like that with us. Say that a particular high school senior might be happier and more productive going to trade school than enrolling in college, and you risk being denounced for harboring the soft bigotry of low expectations. Crawford denounces this as false egalitarianism. "The best sort of democratic education is neither snobbish nor egalitarian," he writes. "Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best." I have seen the truth of Crawford's observations lived out in my own family. My brother-in-law lasted one semester in college. Classrooms bored him. He really wanted to be a firefighter. He entered a big-city fire department, graduated at the top of his class and is now one of the finest firefighters in his city. He could have, but did not, end up like my father, who is now a retiree. He's a mechanical genius who once wanted above all things to work with his hands. But in the 1950s, his working-class parents pushed him hard to go to college, to become upwardly mobile. Dad earned his degree, then spent decades stuck in a desk job he despised. On the weekends, he came alive, sweating and hustling, building, welding, repairing — and in one case, using his innate engineering intelligence to invent a hydraulic woodsplitter. This — not a desk jockey — is who my father really was and was meant to be. In the twilight of his life, my gifted father mourns the road he did not take into the trades because he allowed himself to be cajoled by conformity into college. When I gave him a copy of Shop Class As Soulcraft, he couldn't put it down. He felt deeply vindicated, which is the only comfort left to him, having had his true vocation robbed by pushy parents in thrall to the college myth. But the same revolutionary book that's an old man's vindication stands to be liberation for young men (and women) whose parents and educators have the good sense to read it. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. BUY THE BOOK Click HERE to purchase it at a discount. (Sales help fund JWR.). Comment by clicking here. Rod Dreher is assistant editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum). PREVIOUSLY 05/26/09: What I wish they'd told me at graduation 04/08/09: Secular liberalism as consensus 03/31/09: With so many lies, who can we trust? 03/26/09: Government's war on farmers' markets may bring their demise 03/04/09: Our silly gods and American idols 02/03/09: My pledge? To know which way the wind blows 01/15/09: A populist prairie fire from the right? 01/05/09: Sam Huntington was plainly correct 11/10/08: Here comes the conservative civil war 10/21/08: Mad men in crazy economic times 10/14/08: The positive act of not voting 10/09/08: The speech John McCain should give 09/30/08: And it was written, our blame 09/22/08: The Beehive buzzes for Sarah Palin 09/08/08: Palin's a fighter — and worth fighting for 09/02/08: GOP slouches toward St. Paul 07/18/08: ‘Wall-E’ Pixar's surprisingly political postmodern masterpiece 06/08/08: Era of cheap airfare is over 05/29/08: What if they're not smart enough? 05/11/08: From horror, a child's loving gift 05/07/08:Will a canary be our last meal? 04/03/08: Economic crisis is of our own making 02/14/08: What child-men need is some tradition 02/05/08: A Republican victory this year could do more long-term damage to the party than a loss 01/22/08: Putting faith in Obama: Do GOPers tempted by him know what they're supporting? 11/20/07: We can't fix the world with The Care Bear Stare 10/17/07: Every father should read this book to his son 10/03/07: Not even our parks are safe … And I lay at least part of the blame on the cultural revolution and our obsession with the individual 08/22/07: The Decalogue, dangerous? Advice for a society that cringes at commandments 08/15/07: Playing the anti-science card 08/01/07: How the U.S. can avoid its own version of the fall of the Roman empire 07/24/07: Conservative author: Big business can be as dangerous a threat as big government 07/09/07: All quiet but the doleful pleas of a father who knows 06/28/07: When we let conspiracy theory masquerade as news, we fall prey to much more than deception 06/20/07: Stranded on Delta: They may love to fly, but it certainly doesn't show 06/13/07: When did conservatism start to mean never having to say you're sorry? 05/08/07: PBS darling gets abused by PC police 05/02/07: Impervious to beauty and deadened to depravity 04/20/07: What I know about being a loner 10/28/05: How the conservatives crumble © 2007, The Dallas Morning News, Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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