5 Ideas You Should Know From: Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
/The 5 Big Ideas:
Benefits of deep focus and continued practice
The virtue of attentiveness
Worry less about how you compare to others and less about credentials
Need to have people who have been through tough times
Failure is a great teacher but it’s removed from our lives
My Highlights From the Book:
Benefits of deep focus and continued practice
Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right. In managementspeak, this is called being “ingrown.” The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise.
The truth, of course, is that creativity is a by - product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra). Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence.
The virtue of attentiveness
Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration. I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.
Worry less about how you compare to others and less about credentials
The result is “a growing emphasis on producing selective symbolic distinctions rather than shared substantive accomplishments.” That is, what matters is your rank among your peers; it matters not if the whole lot of you are ignorant. When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.” Students become intellectually disengaged.
Need to have people who have been through tough times
In his book Real Education, Charles Murray relates a maxim attributed to Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary: “No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life.” Murray adds that “the responsibility of working there was too great . . . to be entrusted to people who weren’t painfully aware of how badly things can go wrong.”
Failure is a great teacher but it’s removed from our lives
Yet, as Murray argues, the experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students. Those who struggle academically experience failure all the time, and probably write off attempts to sugarcoat it with “self-esteem” as another example of how deranged adults can be. But the praising of gifted students for being smart, by parents and teachers, has a far more pernicious effect, especially when such praise is combined with the grade inflation and soft curriculum that are notorious at elite schools.