from Terry Haik
Berry’s influence on my life – and thus inseparable from my teaching and learning – was immeasurable. His ideas for scale, restrictions, accountability, community and careful thinking have a place in more conversations about the economy, culture and calling, if not politics, religion and wherever common sense fails to retain.
But what about education?
Below is a letter in which Berry wrote in response to a call for a short work week. I will leave the dispute next to him, but it makes me wonder if this kind of thinking can have a place in the new forms of training.
When we insist on education to pursue “obviously good” things, what do we miss?
That is, since adherence to the learning practices based on the results, with a close alignment between the standards, the goals of the training and the evaluation, with the careful scripting horizontal and vertically, there are no “gaps”-what is the assumption in this insistence? Because in the play of public education with high bets, each of us is collectively “all this”.
And more so, do we prepare students for “good work” or just academic command? What is the role of public education?
If we are prone to the previous one, what evidence would we see in our classrooms and universities?
And maybe the most important thing is that are they mutually exclusive?
Wendel Berry on ‘good work’
ProgressiveIn the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s note” and in John de Graf’s article (“Less Work, More Life”) offers “less work” and a 30-hour work week as the needs that are as indisputable as the need for eating.
Although I would support the idea of a 30-hour work week in some circumstances, I don’t see anything absolutely or undeniably in that. It can be proposed as a universal need only after abandonment of any respect for the vocation and the replacement of the discourse from slogans.
It is true that the industrialization of almost all forms of production and service has fulfilled the world with “jobs”, which are meaningless, humiliating and boring – as well as inherently destructive. I do not think there is a good argument for the existence of such work and I want it to be removed, but even its reduction requires economic changes that have not yet been defined, let alone advocate the “left” or “right”. None of the parties, as far as I know, leads to a reliable distinction between good work and poor work. To shorten the “official work week” until the consent of the continuation of bad work is not much solution.
The old and honorary idea of a “calling” is simply that each of us is called by God, or by our gifts or by our preferences, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly adapted. In this idea, it is obviously the frightening opportunity to work with desire and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.
Only in the absence of a viable idea of calling or good work can a distinction be made, implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “balance between professional and privacy,” as if one travels every day of life here to work there.
But do we not even live when we are most nothing and harmful to work?
And isn’t this exactly why we object (when we object) to a bad job?
And if you are called for music, farming or carpentry or healing, if you make a living through your calling, if you use your skills well and for a good purpose, so you are happy or satisfied with your work, why should you do less than it?
More importantly, why should you think about your life as different from him?
And why should you not encounter any official decree that you have to make less than it?
A useful discourse on the topic of work would raise a number of questions that G -n DE Graf has neglected to ask:
What kind of work are we talking about?
Have you chosen your job or do it under compulsion as a way to make money?
How much of your intelligence, your love, your skill and pride are your work hired?
Do you respect the product or service that is the result of your work?
Who do you work for: Manager, boss or yourself?
What are the environmental and social costs for your work?
If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or jumping beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graf and his experts on working life: that all the work is a bad job; that all workers are unhappy and even helplessly dependent on employers; This work and life are irreconcilable; And that the only solution to a bad job is to shorten the work week and thus divide the casualties into more people.
I do not think that anyone can honestly object to the proposal in theory that it is better to “reduce the hours rather than to release workers.” But this gives rise to the likelihood of reduced income and therefore less “life”. As a means of this, G -n de Graf can only offer “unemployment benefits”, one of the most fragile “safety networks” of the industrial economy.
And what will people with “more life” do, which is understood as the result of “less work”? G -n de Graf says they will play more, sleep more, garden more, spend more time with friends and family and drive less. ” This happy vision comes from the proposal, not so long ago that in the leisure time received from the purchase of “labor savings”, people would patronize libraries, museums and symphony orchestras.
But what if the released workers are driving More?
What if they recreate with off -road vehicles, fast motorcycles, fast food, computer games, television, electronic “communication” and different genres of pornography?
Well, it will be a “life”, it seems to be a job.
G -n de Graf makes the more doubtful suggestion that the work is a static amount, reliably affordable and divisible on reliably sufficient portions. This suggests that one of the goals of the industrial economy is to provide employment to workers. On the contrary, one of the goals of this economy has always been to transform independent farmers, shops and traders into employees, and then use employees as cheap as possible, and then replace them as soon as possible with technological substitutes.
So there may be less working hours for separation, more workers, including separation, and less unemployment benefits to relax.
On the other hand, there is a lot of work that needs to be done -ecosystem and restoration of reservoirs, improved transport networks, healthier and more fascinating food production, soil protection, etc. “That no one is ready to pay yet.” Sooner or later, such work will have to be done.
We can work longer working days so that we do not “live” but survive.
Wendel Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry–S the letter originally appeared in Progressive (November 2010) In response to the article “Less work, more life.” This article originally appeared on SuperblyS
