

Camille Paglia on Revalorizing the Trades - pointillistic
http://chronicle.com/article/Revalorizing-the-Trades/124130

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tptacek
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).

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johnconroy
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)

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tptacek
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.

