I've been teaching college students for over thirty years, and one thing I've discovered is: They're getting more useless by the day. I joke with my classes that if the zombie apocalypse ever hits, they need to form a wall around us old people because the minute the internet goes down and they can't google answers to their questions, they're goners. They don't have a clue how anything works.
The advent of the "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top" era of standardized testing has meant fewer and fewer things count as worth learning. Our reading and math test scores needed to keep up with the kids in Beijing, Moscow, and London, so we started to jettison whatever wasn't worth learning (as in, wasn't on a standardized test). What went first? The shop and "home-ec" classes those of us educated in the old days had to suffer through. I remember in shop class having to build a wall with a window that needed to open smoothly, and an outlet and light switch that had better work when Mr. Jahnke connected your wiring to live current. I also remember learning to sew an apron and making a humongous laundry bag that was incredibly useful during college (thanks to a mom who was kind enough to take over laundry duty during the holidays).
The demise of such classes means today's kids are growing up with no sense of what's in the walls or why the lights don't go on when you flip a switch or what to do if your toilet starts to drip in the back. And that's sad. Mike Rowe (of "Dirty Jobs" fame) has been a one-man band on this subject for years, trying to reinstate our cultural sense of value for "the trades." But it's not just the jobs in this area that are important. Every one of us needs to use the toilet at least on occasion (though I know someone who once reported spending a week at camp without ever doing number 2 because the bathroom was so gross...and he survived it with only mild discomfort--or so he says). We all have loose light switches, dents in the wall, and car oil that needs changing. And if we lose interest in such things, it seems to me we're losing interest in cultivating some common sense.
I have a brother-in-law who could build a helicopter with nothing more than a Swiss army knife, a box of toothpicks, and two rolls of duct tape. I'm not his level of handy, but I'm handy enough to replace the valve under the sink and put in a wood floor and replace the railing on our front porch and fix the brakes on my kid's car. And oddly enough, I often find my mind more engaged when I'm doing projects like those than when I'm doing something supposedly more intellectually stimulating. Matthew Crawford, in his interesting book, Shop Class as Soul Craft, says something similar when he talks about how cognitively and even socially stimulated he is when he's repairing motorcycles (versus doing things more commonly defined as "smart" or "challenging," like working for a think-tank). There's something about figuring it out for ourselves--a kind of exploration and engagement and even awe--that we lose when we won't even take a shot at fixing something ourselves. And just maybe we're losing a little something culturally, as well, when we decide working in an office is more valuable than working with our hands, or when we decide it's not worth our time to learn how things work.
Is it really "an education" when it doesn't include the tangible breadth of the world around us? I wonder...and somehow the whole thing makes me a little sad.
*(P.S. I owe Dave Barry, the humor columnist, a debt of gratitude for the title of this post, which he used on a column long years ago. I had his books sitting next to my toilet for decades and have many of his columns all but memorized. Dave--if I happen to steal one of your jokes without giving you credit, I both apologize and thank you from the bottom of my bowl.)
