Mathew Crawford: The Case for Working with your Hands

Mathew Crawford: The Case for Working with Your Hands

The Separation of Thinking from Doing

In this chapter Mathew Crawford explains the purge of traditional skills in the early 1900’s with the introduction of the assembly line, the separation of the planning from the execution, and the large scale change across industry to a more fragmented approach to manufacturing with particular regards to Henry Ford’s motor car company as a catalyst to this assembly line process.

Crawford goes on to explain how this change has not only affected manufacturing and physical jobs, but also white collar and service sectors. Crawford explains how, although there is an “eagerness to end shop class & get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle” white collar professions are also subject to the same routinizations and degradations that hit manual fabrication a hundred years ago. 

Crawford goes on to explain that the professional jobs are also being afflicted with the same processes to divide up tasks and hand over knowledgeable activities to an ever shrinking group of elite workers at the top, and use more and more administrative clerks and assistants to complete these processes, “transferring the knowledge, skill and decision making from employee to employer”.

Crawford rather eloquently compares this to how “computers are transforming the office of the future to the factory of the past”.

Crawford finishes this discussion by asking “What is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice?” and concludes that the only credible answer as seen by him, is one that “avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacity as fully as possible” perhaps indicating that a young person trying to decide on what career path to take, should pursue one of which might fully engage and challenge them as much as possible, and not for them to end up as a another cog in the corporate machine. 

Crawford concludes his thoughts by stating that this “humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing”... a rather thought provoking statement.