[CAUT] "Shop Class As Soulcraft"

[Mark Schecter]

Lists,

I would like to recommend this book to all piano technicians, and really
to almost everyone I can think of. Written by Matthew Crawford, "Shop
Class As Soulcraft" is subtitled "An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." In
a most penetrating and insightful exploration, Crawford puts his finger
on the aspects of human nature, and of our modern social and technical
reality, that to me describe beautifully why I love my work, and why it
is vital that we appreciate the importance of work done by humans with
hands.

The author earned his PhD in political philosophy, and worked briefly in
a Washington think tank, but soon returned to the work he had begun
earlier in his life, repairing machines. He understands the deep
connections between using the hands and using the mind, both in learning
about the world while growing, and in addressing the reality one
confronts daily, grappling with the challenges presented by life in
general and work in particular.

Here is a link to an article written by the author in The New York Times
Magazine, titled "The Case For Working With Your Hands". It is worth
reading in itself, and should serve to introduce the author and his
book. (See excerpt below sig).
http://tinyurl.com/o2t9ox

In case you're interested enough to want to hear the author interviewed, 
here's a link to a local broadcast from 6/12/09 (52 minutes long).
http://tinyurl.com/m5tgty

Enjoy.

-Mark Schecter, RPT
  Oakland, CA


----- an excerpt from the magazine article ---------

"Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given
symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may
interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In
deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to
step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the
lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you,
and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of
judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules.
For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop
than there was in the think tank.

"Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different
intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension
that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness
to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than
assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive
psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of
stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do
when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder
whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of
worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose
valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open
to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at
once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if
he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the
healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate
concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies
the root cause of some problem?"

    --from "The Case For Working With Your Hands"