I Am Not Hamlet

I recently finished Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. He articulates some things that I've been feeling for sometime: namely, that the "information revolution" isn't all it's lauded to be. In fact, he asserts that much "knowledge work" isn't much removed from factory drudgery. Part of the problem has been the way we approach education. He writes, Today in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into "college prep" and "vocational ed" is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one's life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don't learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn ne...

I haven't posted anything here in almost a month, not because I'm avoiding the blog, but because I CAN'T ACCESS THE THNG! Something's going on with the home computer. That was a terrible update. I'll write about the toads trilling on Good Friday evening, on the croaking sandhill cranes at our new little piece of good, gifted earth in Lima Township, about my slow, but steady, crawl to Constantinople, about the Festival of Faith and Writing from whence I type, about my children growing, my marriage strengthening, my upcoming 41st year, anything but a lame, flat, update about computer problems. Life is good, but computers suck.