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."

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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.