Great article about the importance of learning, practical hands-on skills -- even as part of a liberal arts education. Includes mentions of some of my favorite innovative small colleges: Berea, Warren Wilson, Hampshire, etc.
By Scott Carlson
A friend of mine who works at Saint John's University and the
College of Saint Benedict, in Minnesota, recently told me a story: Her
book group read Anna Lappé's
Diet for a Hot Planet, one of many
recent books to focus on the vulnerabilities of the industrial food
system and the threats posed by climate change. The book's treatment of
the topic held few surprises, and the solutions offered were equally
well-worn and deceptively simple: Buy fruits, vegetables, and meats
locally, and cook them at home.
My friend's big surprise came when the students in the group started
talking about the solutions—and found themselves stuck: "Almost all the
students said they didn't know how to cook," she told me, "and even the
young, single adult employees in the group admitted they lacked both the
know-how and motivation."
What makes this story even more poignant is its setting: at sibling
colleges founded by monasteries, where self-sufficiency and
sustainability were once a central ethic, as outlined in the Rule of St.
Benedict. The Benedictine women and men here, along with many of the
older alumni, can still remember when they milked cows, plucked
chickens, and picked potatoes grown on the monasteries' surrounding
land. Bread, furniture, preserved food, ceramics, and other daily
necessities were produced by monks, sisters, and students on the
campuses. While some remnants of that life still exist, much of it is
gone.
I can't help being reminded of that story when in my daily work as a
Chronicle
writer I hear the chorus of complaints about the state of higher
education. You've heard them, too: Higher education is broken; it needs
reinvigoration and reinvention to get students out the door and on their
own as soon as possible. Lawmakers say colleges need to make students
employable and to create jobs. Some critics say colleges should use
technology to scale up; others go so far as to bemoan the physical
campus as an unnecessary, expensive burden in an online world. In that
cultural and economic climate, liberal-arts colleges have been at pains
to articulate their usefulness. They have emphasized that they teach
students how to think, how to be engaged, world citizens—not merely how
to do a job.
I agree that a liberal-arts education provides those intangibles. But
maybe it's time that instruction—at least at some colleges—included
more hands-on, traditional skills. Both the professional sphere and
civic life are going to need people who have a sophisticated
understanding of the world and its challenges, but also the practical,
even old-fashioned know-how to come up with sustainable solutions.
The problems that today's college-going generation will face in the
future are enormous—and the stagnant economy is just the beginning.
Climate change, fossil-fuel constraints, rotting infrastructure,
collapsing ecosystems, and resource scarcities all loom large. Meeting
those challenges will require both abstract and practical knowledge. For
example, some scientists have fretted over the world's limited supplies
of rock phosphate, which is used in agriculture. Because we live in a
country that has more people in prison than in farming, most people
could not tell you that phosphorus is one of the three vital nutrients
needed to grow food crops, nor could they name the other two, potassium
and nitrogen (the latter of which is produced mostly by burning finite
fossil fuels). Even if students never work in agriculture, such
knowledge could help them as aspiring businessmen, future policy makers,
or mere citizens.
Certain colleges, specifically "work colleges" like Warren Wilson
College, Deep Springs College, and the College of the Ozarks, have
long-established curricula that blend manual skills with a liberal-arts
education. But there may be room for more—especially at a time when some
people question the practical value of a college degree. These days a
number of colleges, particularly those in rural settings, are
financially troubled and need new, marketable niches that separate them
from the pack. Instead of viewing the physical campus as a burden, why
not see it as an asset, even beyond the aesthetic attractions of the
quad? With some imagination, couldn't these colleges use their campuses
and rural settings to train students in valuable hands-on skills?
It's already happening at some institutions, particularly those
oriented toward sustainability. In the green dorm at the University of
Vermont, students can teach other students in "guilds" devoted to
sewing, canning, composting, beekeeping, and other skills. L. Pearson
King, a junior environmental-studies major, taught his peers how to
carve spoons in a woodworking guild last year. "It's kind of trivial,
but it's also cathartic and kind of fun," he says of the project, and
the students in his group were immensely proud of their work. "To be
active in the creation of an item forms a completely different
relationship with that item."
At Dickinson College, students like Claire Fox, who just graduated
with a double major in international studies and environmental studies,
can get a practical education on the college's 180-acre working farm.
"It truly enhanced my education," says Fox, who had never had contact
with agriculture before leaving suburban New Jersey to go to Dickinson.
"I walk away from college as a different person compared with some of my
peers who didn't have that experience." And she walks away employed:
She landed an internship in sustainable-development work in Costa Rica
with the School for Field Studies. SFS told her that her work on the
farm was the critical component of her application.
At Unity College, in Maine, students have had a hand in constructing
some of the college's buildings, tending its garden, and working on
renewable-energy projects out in the field with Michael "Mick"
Womersley, an associate professor of human ecology. A former maintenance
engineer in the British Royal Air Force, Womersley tells his students
that a lot of relatively simple projects, like installing a $42
programmable thermostat in a home, can make a big difference in energy
use, yet few people bother. Why?
"A lot of us are bred out of actually doing things," he said when I
met him at a Maine sheep farm, where he was setting up wind-measurement
equipment with the help of two students. "I find that is a big failing
of the sustainability movement—we are so busy talking about things, but
there is a ton of stuff to do."
Or consider Green Mountain College, a once-troubled institution in
rural Vermont. Green Mountain, which now lands at the top of national
rankings of sustainable colleges, has torn up a portion of its athletics
fields to start a small farm that trains students in both cutting-edge
and old-fashioned techniques in growing food without the help of
petroleum. That means using and maintaining human- and animal-powered
machines, using solar energy in innovative ways, learning the importance
of crop rotations and animal manures, and, of course, getting the
basics of growing carrots and tomatoes.
The professors there routinely tie the skills taught on the farm to
the sustainability lessons in the classroom. "Many educational
institutions pride themselves on preparing students to lead a life of
inquiry," writes Philip Ackerman-Leist, an associate professor of
environmental studies who founded the college farm, in
Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader,
a book about building his home and farm in Vermont. But "few actually
challenge and support students to embrace the ecological questions and
immediately begin living the possible solutions—not later but in the
midst of the educational experience itself."
Thomas Maughs-Pugh, dean of the faculty and a professor of education
at Green Mountain, connects the attention to practical skills to John
Dewey, another Vermonter. Dewey was well known for advocating the
incorporation of practical skills, like cooking or sewing, into everyday
education. He was hoping to produce not chefs or tailors, but people
who could grasp the bigger picture.
"If you are going to understand the world you live in, you need to
understand how it got that way in a very practical way—you need to solve
the problems that humans have been trying to solve for 10,000 years,"
Maughs-Pugh says. "The goal was to engage people with addressing the
fundamental occupations of humanity—dealing with food, shelter, heat—and
gain insight into how humans have solved these problems or addressed
these problems, and what the limitations are."
People are quite aware that they are out of touch with the things
that make their lives go, and as a result, you see a resurgence of
interest in practical skills: Home gardening and raising chickens, for
example, have become trendy again in the last few years, perhaps helped
by the economic collapse and the embrace of local food. Etsy, a Web site
focused on artisanal, handmade items, and the so-called "maker
movement," which has a techie focus, both have helped to spread a DIY
ethic. Bookshelves are stocked with titles like
Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World and
Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World.
Even in politics, voters seem to flock to people who consciously
project a veneer of authenticity through practical skills. And so we get
Sarah Palin, the elk hunter and frontier woman; Joe the Plumber, the
straight-talking Everyman; and George W. Bush, the brush-clearing
rancher.
There is a darker side, too. Postapocalyptic flicks like
The Road and
Contagion and numerous zombie stories like
The Walking Dead
have become tremendously popular, allowing people to face the anxiety
of civilizational collapse from the safety of Netflix. (The real-life
breakdown of cities like New Orleans and Detroit is more unsettling.)
Derek Larson, an associate professor of environmental studies and
history at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University,
gets his students to imagine the future by reading techno-utopian and
postapocalyptic fiction. James Howard Kunstler's
World Made by Hand, which describes America after an influenza pandemic and an oil shortage, left them shaken.
"I asked each of them, 'What skills would you have that would be
applicable in that world?'" Larson says. "And they all said, 'Nothing.'
They were actually kind of despairing at this. They said, 'I'd die. What
would I be able to do? I would have no valuable skills.'" When the
environmental-studies curriculum went through a revision recently, he
says, students made one request: Include more practical and hands-on
learning.
A grounding in the way things work provides resourcefulness and
resilience—for individuals, communities, even nations. "One of the
things that made Americans so formidable during World War II was that
when the equipment broke down, there were enough farm boys around who
were able to get the equipment up and running again," Wes Jackson, an
agricultural geneticist and rural activist, noted in an interview many
years ago. "The Germans, on the other hand, had excellent engineering
and specialization, but the run-of-the-mill German did not know how to
fix the equipment. So that was that."
The popularity of Matthew Crawford's
Shop Class as Soulcraft
is another sign of a hunger for these skills. An unlikely best seller,
the book is a philosophical treatise on the connection between thinking
and doing, the dignity of manual labor, and its value in modern society.
Crawford, who earned a doctorate in political philosophy from the
University of Chicago and runs a motorcycle-repair shop, alluded to the
anxiety we feel with the illumination of a "check engine" light when we
have no skills to address it. And he posited that self-reliance is
crucial to emancipation from mindless consumerism. (Eighty years ago,
Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World depicted a populace enslaved by
consumerism, discouraged from fixing things. "Ending is better than
mending," their hypnopaedic proverb said.)
Work colleges have long met that anxiety by teaching the rewards of
self-reliance. "When people ask me, 'What do you get out of the work
program?' I say, 'Skills, maybe. Confidence, absolutely,'" says Ian
Robertson, dean of work at Warren Wilson College, where students are
required to put in hours as woodworkers, farm hands, janitors,
carpenters, cooks, landscapers, and anything else the college needs to
operate, in exchange for room and board.
Students at the college, he says, have a "swagger." Administrators
there like to tell of a snowstorm in 1993, when the students fired up
the tractors to clear the roads and took over the dining hall to keep
essential services up and running, while everything around them shut
down. "After graduation, I see students that then go to start farms,
build furniture, start baby-clothing companies—they just see
possibilities," Robertson says. "They have enough skills, imagination,
and stick-to-itiveness to know how to do it."
Innovation and advanced manufacturing are often cited as panaceas for
our economic doldrums. President Obama hopes for an increase in the
training of young scientists and engineers and has high hopes for
America's penchant for invention. "We can be the ones to build
everything from fuel-efficient cars to advanced biofuels to
semiconductors that we sell all around the world," he has said. "That's
how America can be No. 1 again."
Richard Sennett hears that kind of talk and wonders how America would
pull it off. Sennett, a professor of sociology at New York University
and the London School of Economics and Political Science, has written
extensively about manual skills and the work world in books like
The Craftsman. He lauds the German education system, which has more effectively blended practical skills with on-the-job training.
"And they don't make the distinction between the liberal arts and
skills," he says. "If you become a master electrician in Germany, you
will probably read the great classics of German literature as part of
your education. ... The notion is that the better educated you are, the
better you will be as a worker, the more self-respect you'll have, and
so on."
Compare that with the American system, which is "geared up for a
service economy, where the idea is that people are going to prosper by
getting farther and farther away from the world of skilled
craftsmanship," he says. The higher-education elite doesn't value it.
"Can you imagine Harvard requiring shop class?" he says, chuckling.
"To me the real issue is that neglected zone of what happens in junior
colleges, community colleges, and trade schools—how to raise the game
there, how to make that a more productive site for craftsmanship."
Robert Forrant, a professor of labor and industrial history at the
University of Massachusetts at Lowell and a former factory-floor
machinist, also has his doubts—but from watching his students. Most
science and engineering students that he teaches do not have "a serious
enough regard for the way things get made and the way that things arrive
on our kitchen table to eat in the morning," he says.
Instead his students see themselves as designers, divorced from the
dirty work of making. "Somehow we have this notion that we are going to
be this country that has all the idea people—that all the Steve Jobses
of the world will live in the United States," Forrant says. "From my
vantage point, looking at history, that's rubbish. ... To somehow think
that you can dream something up without really understanding what it
takes to make it flies in the face of reality."
He tries to hammer home the lessons of history: Look at the pioneers
of the computer industry, who were guys tinkering with machines in their
California garages. The craft-brewing industry, which took off after
homebrewing was legalized in 1978, saw 12-percent sales growth from 2009
to 2010. The organic-farming movement is in some ways an outgrowth of
the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although most
people imagine that the future depends on sci-fi technologies, most of
the technologies that make our lives possible today are fundamentally
very old. The steam turbine, the internal-combustion engine, the diesel
engine, the induction electric motor, and the Haber-Bosch process, which
fixes nitrogen as fertilizer, were all invented more than 100 years
ago. Ha-Joon Chang, a University of Cambridge economist, contends that
the electric washing machine, which came into use in the early 20th
century, changed the world far more than the Internet did.
A key to innovation may be not just understanding some of these
technologies but playing around with them as well. Stuart Brown, a
renowned expert on play and education, has pointed out that companies
have found that the most adept and innovative engineers are people who
played with their hands when they were young, building and dismantling
things.
Forrant says that even if his students just want to go into
white-collar work, he emphasizes that they need to have some
understanding of practical skills: "When I talk to them, I say, 'Look:
When you are a manager someday and you have a problem on the shop floor,
do you want to go down there and be a moron, or do you want to go down
there and actually know what you are talking about?'"
At Hampshire College's Lemelson Center, design, innovation, and
making are intimately tied. The center features a machine shop with
lathes, milling machines, bar benders, saws, welding equipment, and
other tools. Blacksmithing and bike-frame building are popular courses
at Hampshire.
The shop is meant to be a place where students in disciplines as
different as engineering, theater, and environmental studies can go to
try out their ideas. "You just can't teach all the little nuances that
come up when you're designing and building something yourself," says
Colin Twitchell, an inventor and entrepreneur who is the center's
founding director.
One of the shop's unexpected benefits has been the way it has
strengthened the college community, with engineers and artists helping
one another with their work. "You get this broad spectrum of people
together, they talk, and there is a real exchange of perspectives that
you can't get any other way," Twitchell says.
Hampshire's shop has even been a hub for students from other
colleges. Several years ago, Sam Merrett, a motormouth environmentalist
and bona fide grease monkey from Oberlin College, built his first
biodiesel reactor with a friend from Hampshire in that shop.
Today he is the sort of entrepreneurial alumnus that any liberal-arts
college would love to call its own. His business—Full Circle Fuels,
which started in a defunct gas station on the edge of town in Oberlin,
Ohio, and recently expanded with another shop in Hudson, N.Y.—converts
diesel cars to run on straight vegetable oil. He has won fellowships and
grants to start his shop, Merrett has converted cars and trucks for
major businesses, and he worked with the state to develop Ohio's first
vegetable-oil fuel pump. He was working on a 2003 Volkswagen when I met
him on a summer afternoon to talk about how he got started.
Again, it was a marriage of liberal arts with practical skills.
Oberlin's environmental-studies program introduced him to the problems
of fossil fuels and the notion of alternative fuels. But Merrett, who
says he was always eager to get out of the classroom, initially got his
practical skills from the college's ragtag bike co-op, where students
like him were handling wrenches for the first time, fixing up junker
bikes, and welding bike frames together to make floats for town parades.
The bike shop gave him the confidence to build biodiesel reactors and
eventually tinker with his family's car, and his business took off from
there.
Merrett feels that he is a clear example of why a student needs
practical arts with liberal arts. "In terms of how I think about the
world, how I think about the impact of my work on the world, and why I
care about what I am doing, the education was immensely valuable," even
if it doesn't help him day to day in a mechanic shop, he says. At a tech
school, he would have missed out on that. "The idea of marrying the two
is so appealing to me, because I do think that just a liberal-arts
education doesn't leave me in a great position, either. It's limiting,
just as a tech-school education is limiting."
It was reunion week when I met Merrett in Oberlin, and he said that
some of his former peers who were coming back seemed a bit lost. They
had spent their college years learning about, say, sustainable
agriculture or urban food deserts, and they left college all fired up to
tackle those issues.
"But they don't know the first thing about how to screw together wood
to build a raised bed," he said. "In some ways, it leaves you in a
place where you feel powerless to get involved."
Scott Carlson is a senior reporter for The Chronicle.
