Let’s Clear the Junk Out From the Colleges

Education must reestablish the bond between craft and craft.

The soul, the mind, and the hand; where is the education that nourishes them all, and in relation to one another?

“They build your new houses out of chalk and sticks,” said my friend the all-purpose carpenter, plumber, mason, and roofer. Of course he will use many of the new products on the market that last longer than some of the old ones and do a better job. Asphalt shingles were cheaper than slate, and easier to repair, though not nearly as durable, nor could they come close to matching them in beauty. But now we have metal roofing, regularly improving in both quality and handsomeness, superior to the asphalt shingles, though still they cannot approach the slate in its natural variations of shade and color, and its earthy gleam when the sun strikes it, especially after a shower of rain.

He had come to our house to fix an electric stove that is 60 or 70 years old. There have been no great technological improvements in this area, he said. Such stoves work now just as they used to. Electric current is sent into a heating element that provides resistance to its passage. The resistance is like sandpaper. It causes, so to speak, friction, and that produces heat. When the circuit inside the element frays, it can cause an arc — the passage of current across too much resistance, with an intense burst of heat; and then the element can catch fire and blow the fuses behind it, which is what happened with our stove. Our friend told us, though, that the older stoves were solidly put together, and, in fact, the wiring in back of ours was all clean and fine. There was no reason to cart the thing to the dump. He said, however, that once a new stove began to go, it was worthless.

I can’t verify what he said, though I do trust his experience. Easier to verify would be what another friend of ours — a retired engineer and another all-purpose handyman, a genius at working in wood and stone — told us about contemporary furniture. “They tell you that you are buying cherry or oak,” he said, “but most of the time the only real cherry or oak is in the veneer.” Lucrative, that trade in veneer. And how is the furniture put together? A lot of screws and glue; not the precise dovetailing and other forms of wood-interlocking that applied pressure against pressure, like the very weight of the keystone at the top of a Roman arch, whose elements held in place not by screws and glue but by their own weight against the precisely dressed and sloped stones beside them.

We have gotten used to shoddy work, and here perhaps we find a link between what our colleges do or fail to do, and what our commercial enterprises do or fail to do. How to put it? What we want in the marketplace are products whose beauty and usefulness show the marks of human hands working under the direction of a discriminating and tactful intelligence; what we get is garishly marketed junk. What we want in the college is intellectual work that is as carefully crafted as a chair whose pieces were shaved and turned and fitted together by an artist in wood, with an eye for the coherence of solidity and style; what we get is, again, garishly marketed junk. Lag screws, particle board, and glue; coincidental similarities taken for correlations, correlations taken for politically significant causation, causation taken for motives to fall under judgment; multiplication of “authorities” by inappropriate citation, or by a great circle of mutual admiration whose members appear to believe that the fallacy of circular reasoning vanishes if only the circle is big enough; and the false glue of faction, binding scholars together not by what they love and what they study closely but by what they hate.

Only thus can I explain how we can have students in our colleges who can show a piece of paper claiming that they have majored in classics, though they do not read Latin or Greek, or that they have majored in English, when almost all of English literature written before 1900 is as alien to them as another universe, or that they have majored in environmental studies, when the depth of their knowledge of physical chemistry, geology, agronomy, and biology hardly extends beyond an introductory course or two. Fancy meeting a furniture maker who cannot turn a stick of maple wood on a lathe. (READ MORE: The Thales Way: The Book That Can Save American Education)

But the problem goes further. Man does not simply buy things, good or bad as the case may be, and then go on his way. We are intimately involved in what we do. The reaction of bad work upon us, whether we produce it or we consume it, is not that of a mechanical force extrinsic to our minds and souls. It is rather that of a chemical or organic force, building us up or corrupting us from within. We change ourselves by what we do or by what we allow to be done to us and for us. And since man is a social being, it requires real determination, even a form of courage, to make the decision not to be a part of the bad work. Here I am making what I hope is an obvious point, since by no means do I claim to have resisted the problem with all my might. Still, we must begin.

Perhaps one place to begin would be to reestablish the bond between craft and craft. We should no more expect every young person of intelligence to embark upon a scholarly craft than to build houses or lay roads. But we should expect of the scholar the same care with his materials that we would expect of an artist in wood and stone. And we might well ask why the men who build our houses have not studied the architecture of the past, and what made for orderly and beautiful dwelling places fit for a wide variety of human purposes, given the variations of climate, terrain, and available materials. We might also ask why those who purport to study economics have so little sense of the human aims that economies are supposed to subserve, resembling instead those arrogant fools who built the Bauhaus boxes for people to live in, forgetting that they were people who must live there, not robots or mental constructs or ants. We might ask why those who study politics seem never to look upon a real polis, inhabited by human beings, especially in their persons male and female, instead treating men and women as interchangeable units in an abstract machine.

We have had more than enough of junk. Maybe we can adopt as a guide for our schools the final words of Ben Jonson’s tribute to Penshurst manor and its homely beauty, reaching beyond mere bigness, disdaining mere show, while penetrating to the core of the human person:

Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee
  With other edifices, when they see
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
  May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.