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by Terry Heick
The influence of the bay on my life – and therefore inseparably of my teaching and my learning – has been immeasurable. His ideas on the scale, the limits, the responsibility, the community and the prudent thought have a place in more important conversations on the economy, culture and vocation, if not politics, religion and anywhere else where common sense does not focus.
But what about education?
You will find below a letter that Berry wrote in response to a call for a “shorter week of work”. I will leave him the argument, but that makes me ask me if this kind of thought can have a place in new forms of learning.
When we insist, in education, to pursue “obviously good” things, that we are missing?
In other words, as an adhesion to learning practices based on results with close alignment between standards, learning targets and assessments, with careful scripts horizontally and vertically, no “gaps” – what hypothesis is integrated into this insistence? Because in the high challenges of public education, each of us is collectively “everything”.
And more immediately, do we prepare the learners for a “good job” or a simple academic mastery? What is the role of public education?
If we were reaching the first, what evidence would we see in our classrooms and our universities?
And perhaps above all, are they mutually exclusive?
Wendell Berry on “good job”
The progressiveIn the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “publisher’s note” and in John de Graaf’s article (“less work, more life”), offers “less work” and a week of work of 30 hours as needs as incontestable as the need to eat.
Although I support the idea of a week of work of 30 hours in certain circumstances, I see nothing absolute or indisputable on this subject. It can only be proposed as a universal need after abandoning any respect for the vocation and the replacement of discourse by slogans.
It is true that the industrialization of almost all forms of production and service has fulfilled the world of “jobs” which are meaningless, degrading and boring – as well as intrinsically destructive. I do not think there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I wish its elimination, but even its reduction requires economic changes not yet defined, and even less recommended, by the “left” or the “right”. None of the parties, as far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. Shortening the “official work week” while consenting to the pursuit of bad work is not really a solution.
The ancient and honorable idea of the “vocation” is simply that we are each called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly adjusted. Implicit in this idea is the obviously surprising possibility that we can work readily and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.
It is only in the absence of a viable idea of vocation or good work that one can make the distinction involved in sentences such as “less work, more life” or “the balance of work”, as if we go daily from life here to work there.
But don’t we even live when we are most miserably and bad at work?
And isn’t that exactly why we oppose (when we do an object) at bad work?
And if you are called to music, agriculture or carpentry or healing, if you earn your life by your call, if you use your skills and for a good goal and you are therefore happy or satisfied with your work, why should you necessarily do less?
Most importantly, why should you consider your life distinct?
And why should you not be faced with an official decree that you should do less?
A useful speech on the subject of work would raise a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:
What work are we talking about?
Have you chosen your work or do you do it as a constraint as a means of making money?
What part of your intelligence, your affection, your competence and your pride is used in your work?
Do you respect the product or service that is the result of your work?
Who are you working: a manager, a boss or yourself?
What are the ecological and social costs of your work?
If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the hypotheses of M. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all the work is a bad job; that all workers unfortunately depend and even helpless of employers; This work and life are irreconcilable; And that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the week of work and thus to divide the wickedness between more people.
I do not think that anyone can oppose the proposal, in theory, that it is better to “reduce the hours rather than dismiss workers”. But this increases the probability of reducing income and therefore less “life”. As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can only offer “unemployment benefits”, one of the most fragile “security nets” in the industrial economy.
And what will people do with the “more life” which is supposed to be the result of “less work”? Mr. de Graaf says they “will do more, sleep more, garden more, spend more time with friends and family and will lead less”. This happy vision descends from the proposal, popular not so long ago, that during the free time won by the purchase of “working economy devices”, people would patronize libraries, museums and symphonic orchestras.
But if the workers released lead more?
And if they recreate with all-terrain vehicles, fast engine boats, fast food games, computer games, television, electronic “communication” and different kinds of pornography?
Well, it will be “life”, supposedly, and everything that beats work.
M. de Graaf makes the additional questionable hypothesis that work is a static quantity, available in a reliably and divisible manner in sufficiently sufficient parts. This assumes that one of the objectives of the industrial economy is to provide employment to workers. On the contrary, one of the objectives of this economy has always been to transform farmers, traders and traders independent into employees, then to use employees as much as possible, then replace them as soon as possible with technological substitutes.
There could therefore be fewer hours of work to divide, more workers among whom to divide them and fewer unemployment benefits to take over.
On the other hand, there is a lot of work to do – an ecosystem restoration and watersheds, improved transport networks, healthier and safer food production, soil conservation, etc. – that no one has yet been willing to pay. Sooner or later, such work should be done.
We can end up working longer so as not to “live”, but to survive.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry‘The letter s appeared originally in The progressive (November 2010) In response to the article “Less work, more life.” This article originally appeared on Outdoor.
