Camille Paglia on Revalorizing the Trades

http://chronicle.com/article/Revalorizing-the-Trades/124130

by pointillistic • 16 years ago

2 3 16 years ago

tptacek2• 16 years ago

It would be nice if she cited any of the people from whom she lifted that thesis almost wholesale. This is basically "Shop Class as Soulcraft" in op-ed form --- which seems to be a trend lately (see: most recent Brooks NYT column).

johnconroy• 16 years ago

I generally find this woman extremely vapid, and basically a con, but I agree with this particular piece. Though it's not exactly earth-shattering news: 'tailor education to the jobs market'. Her discussion of apprenticeships is interesting: I've thought for a long time that apprenticeship would be suitable for coding, rather than endless hours in anonymity in classrooms, and copying your buddy's work to get assignments done (which is the general 'learning' paradigm for most CS students, far as I know)

tptacek2• 16 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly regarding Paglia (shrill, splinter-cell culture warrior), but at the risk of repeating myself, this time with more detail:

Matthew Crawford wrote a pretty famous book about exactly this thesis, _Shop Class as Soulcraft_. Unlike Paglia, Crawford's ideas are based on time actually spent in the trades --- as an electrician and as a mechanic. Unlike Paglia, Crawford's idea isn't simply that the elite schools are out of step with the jobs market, but rather that our alienation from the trades and crafts are inherently worrisome whether or not the money's there for them. Crawford can point to captive consumerism, the plastic and disposable nature of the goods we buy, and the degradation of self-reliance as consequences of the trend towards "knowledge work"; he's not simply suggesting that more people become tradesmen so he can be left to his cushy academic job.

I don't love the book, but consider it as having been worth reading. It's also clearly just one in a line of similar books going back several generations (it may stretch back to the Transcendentalists). For people like Paglia and Brooks to write as if this is an insight that they just recently achieved is disingenuous.

Camille Paglia on Revalorizing the Trades

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