Activity timeline
February 11, 2010
When the conception of work is removed from the scene of its execution, we are divided against one another, and each against himself. For thinking is inherently bound up with doing, and it is in rational activity together with others that we find our peculiar satisfaction.
It is in doing the job nicely that the tradesman puts his own stamp on it. His individuality is not only compatible with, it is realized through his efforts to reach a goal that is common.
His individuality is thus expressed in an activity that, in answering to a shared world, connects him to others: the customers he serves and other practitioners of his own art, who are competent to recognize the peculiar excellence of his work.
Children who enjoy drawing were given marker pens and allowed to go at it. Some were rewarded for drawing (they were given a certificate with a gold seal and ribbon, and told ahead of time about this arrangement), whereas for others the issue of rewards was never raised. Weeks later, those who had been rewarded took less interest in drawing, and their drawings were judged to be lower in quality, whereas those who had not been rewarded continued to enjoy the activity and produced higher-quality drawings. They hypothesis is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it. That is, an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling. A similar effect may account for the familiar fact that ...
When the maker's (or fixer's) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception.
There is further evidence to suggest that what an expert human chess player does do is recognize patterns, like a firefighter. In a famous experiment, chess players of varying levels of competence viewed chess boards projected on a screen for a few seconds each. They then had to reproduce the configuration of pieces they had seen. When the projected configurations were ones that actually occur in the game of chess, grandmasters were able to correctly reproduce the positions of twenty to twenty-five pieces, very good players about fifteen pieces, and beginners five or six. But when the pictures flashed before them showed random configurations of pieces, not corresponding to patterns they would have actually come across in playing chess, then there was no difference in the players' ability to reproduce the positions from memory; players of all levels were able to reproduce the positions of only five or six pieces ...
Our ability to make good judgements is holistic in character, and arises from repeated confrontations with real things: comprehensive entities that are grasped all at once, in a manner that may be incapable of explicit articulation. This tacit dimension of knowledge puts limits on the reduction of jobs to rule following.
If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it. And in fact this is the case: to really know shoelaces, you have to tie shoelaces.
We take a very partial view of knowledge when we regard it as the sort of thing that can be gotten while suspended aloft in a basket. This is to separate knowing from doing, treating students like disembodied brains in jars.
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The things we know best are the ones we contend with in some realm of regular practice. The way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it. For him, this was a deep point about the apprehension of the world in general. The pre-occupation with knowing things "as they are in themselves" he found to be wrongheaded, tied to a dichotomy between subject and object that isn't true to our experience. The way things actually "show up" for us is not as mere objects without context, but as equipment for action (like the hammer) or ...
Practical know-how, on the other hand, is always tied to the experience of a particular person. It can't be downloaded, it can only be lived.
"If you don't vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit."
In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasonf or acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent. The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it. Or he may explain little, and the learning proceeds by example and imitation. For the apprentice, ther eis a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the mater's actions. He may not know ...
Psychologists find positive correlation between repeated praise and "shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that the answers have the intonation of questions." The more children are praised, the more they have a stake in maintaining the resulting image they have of themselves; children who are praised for being smart choose the easier alternative when given a new task. They become risk-averse and dependent on others.
One way of getting at this possibility is to ask: How is being part of a crew different than being part of a "team" in the new mode of office work? The answer must lie, in part, in the ambiguous character of the thing produced in the latter. Say it is a marketing team at Apple. The success of the iPod, as a product, can't be specified in narrow engineering terms. Its success is due to the production of a new kind of behavior in consumers; we listen to music in a new way. The team's job is part of a large and complex enterprise, the object of which is to produce culture, and it is hard to get metrics of individual contributions to such an effort. Because of the scale and complexity of the undertaking, the responsibility success and failure are difficult to trace. There are no ...
Managers needed to become anthropologists. But above all they needed to become founders of cultures, Like a Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad. That is, their anthropological finesse would not take the form of detached analysis, but rather of charismatic world making (with executive pay to match.) ... This is a charismatic leader of a new kind, a sort of radical democrat. He does not seek followers; he seeks to make every man a leader of himself. Authority itself disappears as he returns work into play. He erects Nerf basketball hoops; he announces pajama day. The creative class expands.
The result is "a growing emphasis on producing selective symbolic distinctions rather than shared substantive accomplishments." That is, what matters is your rank among your peers; it matters not if the whole lot of you are ignorant. When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: "All human beings by nature desire to know." Students become intellectually disengaged.
Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reasons given, namely, that there is an ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations of reality. This cannot be called cynicism if it is indispensable to survival ...
Further, the technocratic/meritocratic view of education treats it as instrumental--it is good for society, and for getting ahead--and this has a corrupting effect on genuine education. As Labaree writes, "Formal characteristics of schooling--such as grades, credits, degrees--come to assume greater weight than substantive characteristics, as pursuing these badges of merit becomes more important than actually learning anything along the way... Teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses."
Pedagogically, you might want to impress on a student the miserable state of his mind. You might want to improve the student by first crushing him, as then you can recruit his pride to the love of learning. Yo might want to reveal to him the chasm separating his level of understanding from the thinkers of the ages. You do this not ...
I perfectly exemplified the knowledge worker, and what's more, I had an advanced degree to match. My very existence, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet, in viewing my situation from afar in this way, the M.A. degree serves only to obscure a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?
Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation. Working as an electrician, you breathe a lot of unknown dust in crawl spaces, your knees get bruised, your neck gets strained from looking up at the ceiling while installing lights or ceiling fans, and you get shocked regularly, sometimes while on a ladder. Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal, and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.
American businesses have shifted their focus from the production of goods (now done elsewhere) to the projection of brands, that is, states of mind in the consumer, and this shift finds its correlate in the production of mentalities in workers. Process becomes more important than product, and is to be optimized through management techniques that work on a deeper level than the curses of a foreman.
Corporations portray themselves as results-based and performance-oriented. But where there isn't anything material being produced, objective standards for job performance are hard to come by. What is a manager to do? He is encouraged to direct his attention to the states of minds of his workers, and become a sort of therapist.
But there is another class of arts that Aristotle calls "stochastic." An example is medicine. Mastery of a stochastic art is compatible with failure to achieve its end (health). As Aristotle writes, "It does not belong to medicine to produce health, but only to promote it as much as is possible..." Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from building things from scratch. The mechanic and the doctor deal with failure every day, even if they are an expert, whereas the builder does not. This is because the things they fix are not of their own making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way.
