Should Your Honor Student be in Shop Class?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:25:00 +0000

Matthew Crawford’s essay in New York Times Magazine last weekend, “The Case for Working With Your Hands” really resonated with me. The primary focus is the intellectual challenges and rewards of repairing motorcycles, as compared with “knowledge work” jobs that our society seems to value. But one point at the end captured my attention:

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

Education on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Should Your Honor Student be in Shop Class?