by Terry Heick
The influence of Berry on my life– and therefore inseparably from my mentor and knowing– has been immeasurable. His concepts on scale, limitations, liability, community, and cautious reasoning have a place in bigger conversations regarding economy, culture, and occupation, if not national politics, faith, and just about anywhere else where good sense stops working to stick around.
However what about education?
Below is a letter Berry composed in feedback to an ask for a ‘much shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the disagreement approximately him, however it has me questioning if this sort of thinking may have a location in new learning types.
When we firmly insist, in education, to pursue ‘certainly good’ points, what are we missing out on?
That is, as adherence to outcomes-based knowing experiment limited positioning in between standards, discovering targets, and assessments, with cautious scripting horizontally and vertically, no ‘spaces’– what assumption is installed in this insistence? Because in the high-stakes game of public education, each people collectively is ‘done in.’
And much more promptly, are we preparing students for ‘good work,’ or merely academic fluency? Which is the role of public education?
If we had a tendency in the direction of the previous, what proof would certainly we see in our class and colleges?
And maybe most notably, are they equally special?
Wendell Berry on ‘Good Work’
The Dynamic , in the September problem, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the article by John de Graaf (“Less Work, More Life”), provides “less work” and a 30 -hour workweek as demands that are as unassailable as the need to consume.
Though I would certainly sustain the idea of a 30 -hour workweek in some conditions, I see nothing outright or undeniable about it. It can be recommended as an universal demand just after desertion of any type of respect for occupation and the substitute of discourse by slogans.
It holds true that the automation of practically all kinds of production and solution has filled the globe with “jobs” that are useless, undermining, and boring– as well as naturally devastating. I don’t assume there is an excellent argument for the presence of such job, and I long for its elimination, but even its decrease asks for economic adjustments not yet specified, let alone supported, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, until now as I understand, has created a trustworthy difference between great and poor work. To shorten the “main workweek” while consenting to the extension of negative job is very little of a service.
The old and ethical idea of “occupation” is just that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our choice, to a sort of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this concept is the obviously shocking possibility that we could function voluntarily, which there is no needed contradiction between job and joy or contentment.
Just in the absence of any sensible idea of job or good work can one make the difference suggested in such phrases as “much less job, even more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to function there.
Yet aren’t we living also when we are most badly and harmfully at the office?
And isn’t that exactly why we object (when we do object) to poor work?
And if you are contacted us to songs or farming or carpentry or recovery, if you make your living by your calls, if you use your abilities well and to a good purpose and as a result are happy or completely satisfied in your job, why should you always do much less of it?
More important, why should you think about your life as distinctive from it?
And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do much less of it?
A useful discussion on the subject of job would elevate a variety of inquiries that Mr. de Graaf has disregarded to ask:
What work are we talking about?
Did you pick your job, or are you doing it under obsession as the method to earn money?
How much of your knowledge, your affection, your skill, and your pride is utilized in your work?
Do you value the product or the solution that is the result of your work?
For whom do you function: a manager, a manager, or on your own?
What are the ecological and social expenses of your work?
If such questions are not asked, then we have no other way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life specialists: that all work is bad work; that all employees are sadly and even helplessly based on employers; that job and life are intransigent; and that the only remedy to poor work is to reduce the workweek and hence divide the badness among even more people.
I don’t think anyone can fairly challenge the proposition, theoretically, that it is much better “to minimize hours as opposed to lay off workers.” But this elevates the chance of reduced income and consequently of much less “life.” As a treatment for this, Mr. de Graaf can use just “unemployment insurance,” one of the industrial economy’s even more breakable “safeguard.”
And what are people going to do with the “even more life” that is recognized to be the result of “less job”? Mr. de Graaf claims that they “will exercise much more, sleep more, garden much more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive much less.” This pleased vision descends from the suggestion, popular not so long back, that in the extra time acquired by the acquisition of “labor-saving tools,” people would buy from collections, museums, and symphony orchestras.
However what happens if the liberated employees drive more
Suppose they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, fast food, computer games, television, electronic “interaction,” and the different styles of pornography?
Well, that’ll be “life,” supposedly, and anything defeats work.
Mr. de Graaf makes the additional skeptical presumption that work is a static amount, dependably offered, and divisible into dependably sufficient portions. This expects that one of the objectives of the commercial economic climate is to give employment to workers. As a matter of fact, among the functions of this economic situation has actually constantly been to transform independent farmers, storekeepers, and tradespeople right into workers, and afterwards to utilize the employees as cheaply as possible, and after that to replace them asap with technical replacements.
So there could be less working hours to divide, a lot more workers among whom to separate them, and less unemployment benefits to take up the slack.
On the other hand, there is a lot of work requiring to be done– ecological community and landmark repair, enhanced transportation networks, much healthier and safer food manufacturing, soil preservation, and so on– that no one yet is willing to spend for. One way or another, such job will certainly need to be done.
We might end up functioning longer workdays in order not to “live,” yet to survive.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry s letter initially showed up in The Progressive (November 2010 in response to the write-up “Less Work, More Life.” This short article originally appeared on Utne