“The Intelligence of Plumbing” from the Mind at Work

I’m reprinting here a short chapter from The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. I’m going to be talking about the chapter to a few classes at UCLA this quarter, and in rereading it decided it is relevant to some vocational education and labor issues that are currently in the air.

The first thing to consider is that programs like the one I write about here came about through federal and state grants, yet the Trump administration is proposing big cuts in allocations for work-force development and Career and Technical Education. Relatedly, the current administration is considering increased funding for apprenticeship programs, and apprenticeships that build on the training received by the students in this chapter would be a good thing, indeed. The teacher we’ll meet worries most about what will happen to his students once they reach the end of his program. The big question is what would be the nature of the apprenticeships? What kind of guidelines would the Trump administration put in place? It’s clear in what you’re about to read that apprenticeship also means mentorship for these young people. There hasn't been a lot of evidence in the Obama-era Department of Education nor under Betsy DeVos that the intricate human dimension of learning and development has been given much weight. Finally, the teacher you’ll meet, an experienced plumber with a keen intuitive sense of what young people need, grants his students intelligence and responsibility. Will Career and Technical Education under the Trump/DeVos do the same or be reduced to narrow job training?

Let’s go now with Mr. Jon Guthier to the kitchen of a small apartment in Phoenix, Arizona where he and his students are about to repair a leaky sink.

***

We are crowded into the kitchen of a small apartment.  The tenant, a young woman bouncing a baby on her knee, sits by the back door watching us.  Mr. Guthier, Terry, and two other boys are squatting down looking under the sink.  The base of the sink is enclosed within a cabinet, so access is restricted.  There is an old pan under the curve of the p-trap; it catches one of the leaks Guthier and his students will fix.  A section of the pipe has been replaced, and dried glue of some kind covers the seam in uneven globs.  About three-quarters of the pipe, from the sink to the p-trap, is wound in black tape.   I am kneeling next to Terry, 17, two days beard, slight nose, a scar across his extended hand.  Like the young hairstylists we just met, Terry is at an important point in his development—but for him, an opportunity or a disruption could have huge consequences.

           

Terry, like most of the boys in this room, is in a special program for young people who have a history of drug abuse and a consequent history with the juvenile justice system.  The program enables them, as part of their probation, to finish high school in a curriculum that will provide them with a general education and entry-level competence in one or more of the construction trades.  Though most of the boys have mediocre to poor school records, a number of them take to the program, seeing it as a way out of a bad situation. They throw their considerable energy into the work, running back and forth for supplies, taking stairs two at a time, curling themselves around and under sink cabinets, toilets, the underbellies of old houses.  As one boy announces to his classmates after a successful toilet installation: “Hey, this ain’t that hard.  I could do this for a living.” 

I met Mr. Guthier and his students during my visits to MetroTech, a vocational high school in Phoenix, Arizona that is making the transition to an integrated academic-vocational curriculum. This particular program is one of a number of efforts these days to create surer pathways from school to work.  The emphasis in much of what is said and written about such programs is on the economic benefits to student and society.  And there is also a critical literature, skeptical about linking education so closely to the job market.  I'll say more about these issues in a subsequent chapter on vocational education, but for now I want to consider a set of issues less discussed in the school-to-work debates, but important to the themes of this book: work as a vehicle for human relation, the importance of adult mentors in the development of competence, and the continual play of intelligence in that relationship and development.  Along with the story of Terry and his peers learning a trade, and the story of their rehabilitation, there is a story here about mind and the pivotal role of human connection. 

Field experience is essential to Jon Guthier’s teaching, and one way he secures such experience for his students is through an arrangement with the city to do free repairs on low-income housing.  Repair work, especially on older or less expensive homes and apartments, offers important challenges for young plumbers that they won’t get doing new construction.  Materials are not always standard; there are unusual structures, nooks, crannies, surprises within the wall; there is often a series of past repairs, layered one over the other, often makeshift.  In a sense, such occasions take the students back to a time before codes and prefabrication.  They will need to develop a certain resourcefulness and a problem-solving orientation to things.

“What do you make of this, boys?,” asks Mr. Guthier, pointing to the taped pipe.  “Looks like a mess,” says Terry.  “Yep,” says the teacher, “What do you think we should do with it?”  “We gotta replace it,” says one boy.  “Well, sure,” says Mr. Guthier, “but how, where…how do we start?”

            Jon Guthier is a slight man, about 5’7”, 135 lbs., with thin muscled arms, long brown hair, and glasses.  At 47, he’s worked plenty of construction-related jobs, has been a journeyman plumber and gas fitter for a number of years, and has been teaching for the last twelve.  A photograph of him might suggest severity of manner—his features are sharp, angular, and weathered from all those years outdoors—but he has an easygoing way about him, a how’s-it-going loquaciousness.  The kids call him “Mr. G.”,  or just “G.”.  And they respect him, his concern for them, and his expertise.  He's been there, has done the work, knows what he's talking about.  So they consult him frequently—he’s on the run at a job site from one kid to another—and they take his questions seriously.  He poses questions often.  When he and a class return to a job site, he’ll begin the day by asking the students to go over the problems they had the day before and, as a consequence, to list the things they’ll need to do today.  When they confront a new job—replacing a toilet, fixing a leak—he asks what they’d do and why.  Terry takes his question about that pipe under the sink and suggests they strip the tape to get to the nut attaching the drain pipe to the p-trap.  That’s reasonable, says Mr. Guthier, and with his right hand guiding their gaze over the entire structure asks the boys to consider what might happen as you take a wrench to that nut, given that other sections of the pipe, p-trap, and wall fixture are glued and, most likely, rusted.  Terry gets it: “You’ve gotta be careful.  If that nut won’t turn, you might tear something else loose.”

           

The interconnection of the component parts of a structure is an obvious notion.  But to grasp the meaning of that interconnection for your own action, and to realize that what you do can extend across different kinds of materials, and can be close by or at some distance – such understanding can give rise to deliberation.  A stop-and-think orientation.  I recall an experienced plumber, facing a somewhat more complicated situation of this type, telling me, "It's as important to say 'no' [to a possible course of action] as to say 'yes'.  You can get yourself in real trouble if you don't think it through."

Mr. Guthier is moving his students toward the comprehension of a house as a complex system of materials, processes, and forces: not an obvious way to think about a building.  And his questioning serves a further purpose: to help students become systematic in their approach to repair.  The good plumber has a diagnostic frame of mind, evident in a manual that Mr. Guthier uses during classroom instruction.  The manual is organized by problems—for example, “a valve or faucet does not completely stop water flow”—that are followed by lists of possible causes.  Students are required to consider and test each possibility in turn: a kind of plumber’s differential diagnosis.  Could it be a bad washer?  How about foreign matter—rust, grit—caught in the valve?

            To think this way, Mr. Guthier explains to me, you need “to know how a thing is put together”, how a device, or a category of devices, works.  You may not be familiar with a particular brand of a valve, but if you can determine whether it’s a cartridge valve or a compression valve, then you’ll know something generally about its components and how they function.  Then you’re able “to go through these steps in your mind.”  Given the huge variety of devices and structures you’ll encounter in any group of old houses, you need to be able to operate in some systematic way.  As they get more adept, these young plumbers may abbreviate the steps, zeroing in on a key feature of the problem rather than ticking off each item on a checklist.  But for now I want to dwell on the development of these students’ skill and their teacher’s desire that they become both knowledgeable about the way things are constructed and systematic in the way they use that knowledge.

            In this regard, it would be worth considering how Jon Guthier functions as mentor, as guiding adult, given his students’ legal situation. “You feel that sense of urgency in them,” he observes, “because even as things go well, something could fall apart right at the end.”  Though he does have heart-to-heart conversations with these boys about their behavior, the direction of their lives, and particular ethical dilemmas they face, a significant dimension of his mentoring role is played out through the work itself.  Some of the teachers I've observed while writing this book tend toward the moral lecture, the lesson-on-life delivered from the front of the classroom.  These, as best as I can tell, have little effect – did many of us respond well to them?  Yet, as Mr. Guthier pointed out, there is great need here for guidance and structure. "When children feel that adults cannot or will not protect them," writes youth activist Geoffrey Canada in Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, "they devise ways of protecting themselves."  Yet, for all their hard-nosed bravado, most of these kids' lives are chaotic.  Think, then, of what a guided participation in the work provides: structure and routine, to be sure, and a meaningful connection to an adult, and a sense of helping people out by repairing their homes.  There is also, I believe, an ethical dimension to the way Mr. G. encourages the young people in his charge toward a skillful and systematic encounter with the material world, toward an understanding that yields agency.

           

Several days after the students were pondering that taped drain pipe, Terry and a big kid named Ken are replacing a toilet in an old house.  Terry has more experience at this task than Ken, so Mr. Guthier tells Ken to do most of the installation and asks Terry to help out and observe.

            Installing a toilet is a pretty straightforward procedure, but replacing one, especially in an older house, can have its moments: removing the old toilet, negotiating tight space, fitting a newer model into the existing confines and fittings, and so on.  One decision that has to be made concerns the flange, the collar that fits over the drain pipe in the floor, and onto which the toilet itself is attached.  There’s some ambiguity here, but you try to determine how corroded the existing flange is, whether or not it’ll hold new bolts, will they be stable?

            As soon as the boys remove the old toilet, Mr. Guthier asks them what they think of the flange.  There’s a quick exchange, then Mr. Guthier hears someone calling him from the kitchen and excuses himself.  “I’m not sure,” he says, exiting, “but I think you might want to replace it.  You don’t want to take a chance on a call-back.”

            Ken and Terry settle in, Ken getting down close to the flange, inspecting it.  Terry asks, “How’s it lookin’ to you, Ken?”  Ken scrapes at the edge of the flange with a screwdriver.  “It looks OK,” he answers and cocks his head to get a better take on the edges.  Then he slips in two new bolts.  “The bolts are going in nice and strong.”  Pause.  “I think we can keep it.  Go get ‘G’.”  Terry retrieves Mr. Guthier; the boys explain what they’ve done and their conclusion.  “Well,” he says, “you might be right.”

            Not everything Terry and Ken say during this installation, God knows, surely not everything, is so dialogic and problem-focused.  But the installation proceeds effectively, and, at several junctures, is characterized by this kind of thoughtful activity.  The independence of thought and outcome—the boys’ decision does not take the easy path of agreement—suggests that they’re appropriating the diagnostic frame of mind modeled by Jon Guthier.  They don't simply follow a routine, but vary it purposively in response to their testing of the materials before them.

            As I spend time with these young people, I’m struck by the way that Mr. Guthier’s program not only allows them to find a temporary balance within chaos, but, as well, becomes a means for them to achieve what they, for a variety of reasons—some beyond their control, some of their own making—could not achieve in the standard classroom.  Their work with Jon Guthier exposes and nurtures their intelligence, becomes a kind of diagnostic for what they can do when they put their minds to it.  Their teacher realizes acutely the legal and existential fix the boys are in, but addresses it, so to speak, through their engagement with tools and fixtures, water and pipe and surrounding structures. 

           

            I find myself thinking, too, of the imperfect bargain here.  There is a long tradition in the United States—dating back to Nineteenth-Century reform schools—of trying to redeem wayward children through the industrial arts.  This tradition often brought with it not only assumptions about the moral benefits of physical work but also about the intellectual capacity of working-class, urban youth.  Jon Guthier’s program, then, is embedded in a complicated history—one he works within, but modifies.  It is blue-collar work that is offered to these kids—wealthy kids in trouble would have many more options—but Mr. Guthier takes it seriously and makes it substantial.  (Historically, programs of this type frequently involve low-level and limiting tasks.)  And from what I could discern of Terry and his peers’ point of view, the plumber’s trade provides one of the most unambiguous pathways they’d yet seen toward stability.

            The huge question—one Jon Guthier frets over—is what will happen to the boys once they complete the program?  What social and occupational mechanisms will be in place to forward their development?  There’s a crucial public policy question here, one frightful to ask in these times of backlash against the less fortunate.  What opportunities exist for the kind of technical and human engagement this program provides, and how deeply does the nation believe in its value? 

* * *

           

Dwayne, the fellow who announced that he could install toilets for a living, sits amid a group of boys on the bus, head phones on, singing along loudly to a Twista cassette, which, of course, we can’t hear, and are left, instead, with Dwayne’s assured but not very skillful falsetto.  Several of the boys around him, Denzell particularly, complain, questioning his talents, but Dwayne, a mix of nonchalance and confrontation, throws it right back, praising the quality of his own voice.  Then back to song and complaint.  Finally, Mr. Guthier, looking up into the rear-view mirror, asks if everyone could please cool it, and they do, at least for a few blocks.

            Dwayne will not let you miss him for long.  He’s boastful, funny, quick-witted, out on you for a response or a cigarette, handsome and charming in a boyish, street-smart way.  With older men his demeanor shifts—he’s still working you, but the quality of the interaction changes—there’s more accommodation, and more need and request.  Dwayne generates so much activity in the immediate space surrounding him—a flurry of word and gesture—that it’s easy to miss, I certainly did, his considerable promise as a tradesperson.  Mr. Guthier calls him “ a quick study” and thinks he’s the most competent student in the class.

            If you hang around Dwayne at a job site, you’ll witness, more than a few times, an event like this: Dwayne and another boy are finishing the installation of a toilet, and are hooking up the braided hose that brings water from the wall outlet—called an angle stop—to the tank.  As they tighten the nuts, Dwayne cradles the hose in a certain way to keep it from twisting and kinking.  A few minutes later, Mr. Guthier comes in to remind the boys to be careful that the hose doesn’t kink on you—but Dwayne had anticipated that, having already acquired the proper trick of the trade from Mr. G.  Here’s another: Dwayne is assisting Denzell as he replaces a showerhead.  Denzell tightens the head and tries it.  It leaks.  He tightens it further.  The head still leaks.  “I bet you don’t have the washer in right,” suggests Dwayne.  Upon disassembly Dwayne turned out to be correct.

            Dwayne’s advice to Denzell came amid a narrative about a confrontation with some guy at a girl's house, whereupon Dwayne conducted himself mightily, deftly…and, then, bip—tune out and you’ll miss it—there's the hunch about the washer.  Settle in with Dwayne long enough, and you begin to see: Dwayne leaning in to inspect a faucet or a flange, feeling carefully with an index finger to confirm what he sees; ticking off, amid chatter, the steps needed to test a fixture; recalling a solution to a similar problem solved in another house, another time.

           

Dwayne is demonstrating the development of what Jon Guthier calls “a kind of a library” of mechanical knowledge: knowledge of types of devices, how they’re put together, how to work with them, processes to follow.  This blend of learned facts, experiences, and procedures makes Dwayne capable of functioning without close supervision.  The relation of learning and independent action.

            To consider action, though, one has to consider factors beyond knowledge alone.  To continue with Jon Guthier’s metaphor, the tradesperson’s library contains more than books; there’s a feel and mood to the place, a history, traditions, practices.  The skillful tradesperson is defined by what he or she knows, but, as well, by the quality of the work that knowledge yields.  Dwayne and two other boys are replacing a toilet.  They have removed the old unit, and while one is replacing the angle stop on the wall, another is quickly scraping the residue of the old assembly from the floor.  Then they put in a new flange, tap it into place, insert the bolts onto which the new toilet will rest, measure the distance of each bolt from the wall (13 1/2 inches) to check alignment, place a donut of bowl wax over the flange (this protects against leaking), settle the new toilet onto the bolts, and measure again.  These three boys work well together, dividing tasks yet assisting each other, efficient, assured.  While they finish the installation, they talk about employment, jobs this training might enable them to get.

            The final step is to apply caulking along the base of the toilet.  Dwayne cleans up and dries off the floor, then reaches for the caulking gun, and begins laying a neat strip of caulk around the porcelain.  The caulk smells like pungent bananas—chemical and fruity—and another boy follows Dwayne’s trail with a gloved forefinger, narrowing the line.  Finished, Dwayne takes a small sponge and further trims the caulking, a thin line now at the base of the toilet.  He stands up: “A few good flushes, and we’re done.”  It does look good.  Clean and tidy.  As the other boys pick up tools and leave to reassemble with Mr. Guthier, I compliment Dwayne, who has fallen quiet.  He breaks into a full smile, “Why, thank you very much,” he says.

           

This moment clarifies in my notes like a snapshot.  How much comes together to account for it, a developmental integration.  The increasing dexterity with tools.  Knowledge of plumbing devices and materials.  A range of understandings about repair.  Tricks of the trade.  A systematic approach to problems.  And there is the less measurable—but readily evident—sense of workmanship, the complex set of values that, one assumes, leads Dwayne both to measure the distance of the toilet to the wall—an action with functional consequences for repair—and to take one more pass at the caulking to reduce it to a visually pleasing line, an aesthetic outcome.

            A sense of workmanship is something that Mr. Guthier hopes for.  “I know these boys don’t like to handle dirty toilets,” he observes one day after we’ve returned to school,  “so there’s got to be something there that gives them pride in what they’ve been able to do.”  Some of the boys, he continues, “had very rarely been successful at things. Probably it’s the first thing they’ve finished in a long time.”  If this is true, then one can only imagine the twinge of possibility they feel as they see something they made work, as they gain respect from adults whom they respect, as they begin to imagine—tentatively, anxiously—a different kind of life for themselves, fashioned through hand and brain.

            And what might happen, I wonder, if we began to experiment with our own thinking about young people like Terry and Dwayne, and, more broadly, about the revelation of mind in the work they’re doing.  Too often when we do grant intelligence to common work and to the people who do it, our terms are narrow and demeaning: working people are concrete thinkers, or can only learn in a certain way, or are – this is an older expression – “manually minded.”  Jon Guthier's unexpected metaphor of the library can help us here, and take us beyond the typical discussion of vocational students.  How might it productively unsettle our thinking about intelligence, social class, and education to consider the foregoing account in terms of libraries and aesthetics, of differential diagnosis, of conceptualizing, planning, and problem-solving, of the intimate connection between respectful human relation and cognitive display?  My hope is that such shifts in perception would have consequences for the way we teach Terry and Dwayne, for the subsequent work we imagine for them, for how we talk to them and about them, and for the words we use to describe what they do.

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Education and the New World of Work

A slightly different version of the essay in this post was printed in the Spring, 2016 issue of The Hedgehog Review.

I also want to tell you that a video of a speech I gave at the 2016 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, "Writing Our Way into the Public Sphere", is available on the AERA website, and you can access it here.

***

            Right at the time when there is on many fronts a resurgence of interest in vocational education (known these days as Career and Technical Education or CTE), there is also the proliferation of prophesies about the impending transformation of work, the wholesale diminishment of work, and even the end of work. Will there be any vocations left for vocational education students to enter?

            Since the early 1990s, there have been significant government and privately funded efforts to reform vocational education, to increase its academic content (more math and literacy instruction in carpentry or culinary, for example) and to establish more direct pathways from school to workplace. In line with then-anticipated employment trends, traditional shop classes in the construction trades, automotive repair, and machining were cut back and programs in health care, computer and green technologies, and certain service industries were expanded.

            More recently, a diverse range of commentators – from economists to social critics – have been calling for an expansion of vocational education, including a return of those old shop classes, though updated and computerized to match the current labor market. There are good jobs, economists point out, in mid-level technical occupations such as specialized manufacturing. Some educators (including but not limited to CTE interest groups) emphasize the variability of student interests and aptitudes, not all of which find fulfillment in the typical academic curriculum. And the dramatic rise of the Makers and Do-It-Yourself movements has cast a new, more favorable light on vocational education – shouldn’t all kids have the experience of applying knowledge, making things, tinkering? Finally, Chambers of Commerce, trade groups, state houses, and even the president of our country have been championing community college occupational programs for the aforementioned technology-enhanced jobs in manufacturing, engineering and design, and health care. It’s a promising time for Career and Technical Education.

            Yet on the same opinion page where you might find a commentary touting the virtues of vocational education, you might also find a column on the radically different world of work that we are hurtling toward, even as we read about it… most likely online. At the core of this brave new workplace is the rapidly evolving processing and problem-solving capacity of computer technology. Witness over the last half-century the increased automation of manufacturing and, more recently, the “hollowing out” of seemingly secure white-collar professional jobs that can be broken down into component parts and digitized, from bookkeeping to reading medical images. This increase in computer power and resulting hemorrhaging of jobs will increase exponentially, the forecasters predict, aided by the post-industrial reorganization of work, the loss of union power and collective bargaining protections, and the rise of new industries – like ride-sharing or Airbnb – that substitute part-time, entrepreneurial labor with no protections or benefits for traditional jobs like taxi driver, dispatcher, or hotel worker. These conditions have given rise to a new vocabulary of work – “precarious” being the key adjective.

            There’s no disputing this transformed world of work; what it will yield a decade or two down the line is the much-debated question. Whatever scenario plays out will have major implications for education in general and particularly for Career and Technical Education. Commentators who lean toward the Utopian see a world where much work is automated, and most of us are freed to find reward in creative outlets, civic and social pursuits, caring for others, and the like. Governments will need to create dramatically new ways to support and remunerate such activities. Those commentators with a dystopian bent predict a world of mass unemployment, a scramble for limited, part-time work, widespread aimlessness and depression, and the threat of profound social unrest. And many commentators land somewhere in between these extremes and try to envision within a world of precarious employment ways for people to share jobs; for governments to create vast public works programs; for physical and virtual business incubators and “makerspaces” to connect and nurture entrepreneurs and artisans; for significant revisions in tax codes and financial policy to provide basic needs and income to Americans without traditional employment.

            How do we educate young people for these possible futures?

            To best answer this question, I think we need first to consider the strain of technological determinism in some of the writing on the future of work, for that deterministic perspective affects the way we think about the next generation of Career and Technical Education.

            Though computerization and economic restructuring are changing the workplace profoundly, the way this change plays out in the future will be affected not only by continued advances in technology but also by economic policy, judicial decisions, politics, business and cultural trends, and social movements. Technology is a powerful force, but it does not function or evolve in isolation. In fact, the history of technology is replete with examples of technological innovations that either had a short lifespan or were never taken up at all. Because something is technologically possible doesn’t mean that humans will embrace it.

            Robots can now perform acts of dexterity once thought impossible, for example, unscrewing a lid. Achievements like this lead technology futurists to assume that continued advances will follow, leading inexorably toward human-level dexterity. Such progress is not at all assured and over-generalizes from a breakthrough at one level of engineering to quite another level of sophistication. But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the unlikely happens, and robots can be developed, let’s say, to cut hair, putting the jobs of three-quarters-of-a-million American hairstylists at risk. Would the average person want to forego the touch, judgment, aesthetic sensibility, and free-flowing conversation a human stylist provides, even if a robot could be programmed to execute a technically proficient graduated bob?

            The history of technology also demonstrates that while a new technology (the stethoscope or telephone, for example) can affect, sometimes profoundly, what we can do in and to the world, it emerges from previous technologies and practices, and its adoption is affected by them. And while the new technology typically requires new skills to use, it also draws on existing knowledge and skills, even as it might alter them. In fact, old-technology knowledge can enhance performance. My friend Mavourneen Wilcox was, as a young astronomer, quite skilled at the use of adaptive optics, a revolutionary method of correcting – through an elaborate system of optical sensors and a segmented, rapidly changing mirror – the atmospheric distortion of the light from celestial objects. She credits her finesse in manipulating the instrument to all the time she spent in old-school electronics labs and machine shops, learning “how to work around things when they don’t go right.” We certainly want a new Career and Technical Education to be responsive to changes in the nature and distribution of work, but we also need to be historically grounded in our assessment of the work that lies ahead.

***

            The changes in work we are currently witnessing have several immediate implications for Career and Technical Education. A number of educators and policy makers have noted that some level of computer skill is increasingly necessary for any kind of work, styling hair to auto mechanics to medical technology. So-called “soft job skills” (communication, punctuality, flexibility) have been part of the national discussion about work for decades, and more recently we are hearing a lot about qualities of character like determination, optimism, and the hot buzzword “grit.” These skills and qualities would serve someone well in a precarious economy, the reasoning goes, where resilience, adaptability, and the like become not just desirable but necessary for survival. So too would training in entrepreneurship, developing the ability to seize opportunity and promote one’s talents and resources.

            All well and good. But there are deeper, culturally ingrained issues that I think need to be addressed regardless of what the future holds: status quo to profound transformation. These issues have been evident for some time but are difficult to address. Perhaps the dramatic visions of a new world of work will add some urgency to address them.

***

The first has to do with the long-standing divide in the American school curriculum between the “academic” and the “vocational” course of study, a distinction institutionalized in the early-twentieth-century high school. The vocational curriculum prepared students for the world of work, usually blue or pink-collar work, while the academic curriculum emphasized the arts and sciences and the cultivation of mental life. The separation contributed to the formation of a caste system within the school – “social predestination,” in the words of John Dewey. Another significant problem resulting from the academic-vocational separation is summed up in a historical analysis from the National Center for Research in Vocational Education: “[V]ocational teachers emphasized job-specific skills to the almost complete exclusion of theoretical content. One result was that the intellectual development of vocational students tended to be limited at a relatively early age.” The report captures the fundamental paradox of vocational education as it has been practiced in the United States: its diminishment of the intellectual dimension of common work and of the people who do it. Over the past three decades, school reformers have been trying to bridge this curricular divide, mainly by abolishing the rigid system that tracked students into the academic or the vocational curriculum. But the designation of a course as “academic” still calls up intelligence, smarts, big ideas, while the tag “vocational” conjures quite the opposite.

            Related to the academic/vocational divide in higher education is the “liberal ideal,” the study of the liberal arts for their own sake, separate from any connection to the world of work, crafts and trades, and commerce. The ideal has been with us since Plato and Aristotle; it found full expression in Cardinal Newman’s Victorian-era The Idea of a University; and it figures in discussions of higher education today as colleges and universities have grown and transformed, adding many majors outside of the liberal arts. One current example of this discussion is found in the widely reviewed book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About It. Hacker and Dreifus rightly criticize higher education for a host of sins: soaring cost, production of endless esoteric research, exploitation of adjunct teachers. What is telling is that the model they offer to get college back on track is pretty much Cardinal Newman’s.

Their assumption is that anything vocational cannot lead to, in their words, a liberation of imagination and the stretching of intellect. How telling that in this bold evaluation of the state of higher education, their solution fits into the well-worn groove of the academic/vocational divide, denying the intellectual and imaginative possibilities of any course of study related to work.

            Hand in glove with this gross division of human activity into the academic and the vocational has been the social construction of the vocational student as someone who is either not interested in or not capable of dealing with topics typically defined as abstract or intellectual. We find this definition at play in early deliberations about vocational education in the United States. Psychologists and educators asserted the limited mental capacity of the immigrant and working-class students for whom Voc Ed was created. As opposed to college-bound students (overwhelmingly White and middle to upper class) who were “abstract minded,” working-class and immigrant students were “manually minded” – their brains functioned differently. The terminology has changed, but there is still the strong tendency among some policy makers and, sadly, some educators to assume such cognitive limitation among vocational students. These students might be skilled, dexterous, hard-working, even resourceful and inventive, but not good at abstraction or the conceptual, and not interested in history or psychology or literature.

            For some vocational teachers and programs, these beliefs can translate into a deemphasizing of the conceptual content of work. And historically these beliefs also have resulted in a bland curriculum of non-voc-ed school subjects; science or history lite. But students can dread the history or science textbook and have fits at the threshold of the classroom, but still be interested in history or science… or a host of other subjects when they are presented in a way that doesn’t conjure up the schoolhouse.

           Several years ago I was visiting a humanities course at an occupationally oriented community college, a course required for the Associate of Arts degree. Most of the students were in the construction trades. The class was assigned several essays that dealt with education, sociology, and economics, topics that would seem pertinent to this group, but the discussion was going nowhere. Most of the students were disengaged, some were talking with each other, the teacher was treading water. Fortunately, the teacher had bought in a guest speaker, who took over. He was in education, but had grown up in the neighborhood of the college and his forbears had worked in the manufacturing and service industries. He began by talking about his background, and tied it to some of the topics in the essays. Then he asked the students to describe their high schools, and he pointed out connections with the essays. Thus the class proceded, and the students had a lot to say about the themes in the readings: about economics and inequality, about race and social class, about the goals of education.

            There are so many moments in vocational education where values, ethical questions, connections of self to tradition emerge naturally, and with consequence, ripe for thoughtful consideration. Surrounding such issues, influencing them at every level of working life, are the profound effects of social location, economics, politics. The early architects of VocEd wiped these concerns from the curriculum, and vocational education has been pretty anemic on such topics since. And overall we have done a poor job of supplementing vocational education with a thoughtful and vibrant course of study in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. These are the challenges that face the next generation of Career and Technical Education, and they will demand a deep examination of our cultural biases about intelligence, areas of study, and the purpose of schooling.

***

            The Career and Technical Education student who is prepared for whatever version of work that evolves will need to be computer savvy, resourceful, and entrepreneurial. These qualities seem self-evident and would probably find wide agreement from both educators and employers. But the predictions about the new world of work suggest other educational goals as well.

            Intellectual suppleness will have to be as key an element of a future Career and Technical Education as the content knowledge of a field. The best CTE already helps students develop an inquiring, problem-solving cast of mind, but to make developing such a cast of mind standard practice will require, I think, a continual redefining of CTE and an excavation of the beliefs about work and intelligence that led to the separation of the “academic” and the “vocational” in the first place. Of course, students will learn the tools, techniques, and routines of practice of a particular field. You can’t become proficient without them. But in addition students will need to learn the conceptual base of those tools and techniques and how to reason with them, for future work is predicted to be increasingly fluid and mutable. A standard production process or routine of service could change dramatically. Would employees be able to understand the principles involved in the process or routine and adapt past skills to the new workplace?

            We also will need to examine our culturally received assumptions about people who are drawn to any of the pursuits that fall within CTE, hospitality to nursing to the construction trades. To borrow a phrase from labor journalist William Serrin, we need “to give workers back their heads” and assume and encourage the intellectual engagement of students in the world of work. And if the theorists about the new world of work are right, then more than ever we need to provide for CTE students a serious and substantial education in history, sociology and psychology, economics and political science. What are the forces shaping the economy? Are there any pressure points for individual or collective action? How did we get to this place, and are there lessons to be learned from exploring that history? What resources are out there, what options do I have, how do I determine their benefits and liabilities? Though a curriculum that would give rise to questions like these has typically not been part of traditional vocational education, there is a separate history of worker education programs that blend politics, social sciences, and humanities with occupational education, from early-twentieth-century labor colleges to contemporary institutions like the Van Arsdale Labor Center at Empire State College. We have models to learn from.

These reconsiderations will require a philosophy of education that has at its core a bountiful definition of intelligence and that honors multiple kinds of knowledge and advances the humanistic, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of an occupational as well as more traditional academic course of study. We need such a philosophy now, but we will need it even more in tomorrow’s world of work. Otherwise, the education of future workers will be cognitively narrow and politically passive, adding little more to the current curriculum than additional training in computer skills or techniques of self-promotion. Teach those things, of course, but also educate young workers so that they have multiple skills and bodies of knowledge to draw on, so that they are able to analyze and act upon opportunities to affect the direction of their employment, and so that they can strive to create meaning in their working lives.

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What We Talk about When We Talk about Career and Technical Education

            Here is a slightly different version of a commentary published as “Reframing Career and Technical Education” in Education Week, May 7, 2014.

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The English teacher is reviewing a list of vocabulary words drawn from an essay she assigned to her eleventh graders. She writes “aesthetics” on the board and invites discussion. After a few minutes, a boy who is a talented student in the school’s Wood Construction Academy raises his hand and respectfully submits that the word “doesn’t have anything to do with us.” This fellow daily engages in woodworking activities that have an aesthetic dimension to them—in some cases tasks that centrally involve aesthetic judgment—yet sees no connection between the concept as discussed in his English class and his artful work on a table or cabinet.

            I witnessed or heard of a disturbing number of moments like this when I was doing the research for The Mind at Work, a study of the often unacknowledged cognitive demands of physical work and the effects this lack of appreciation has on education, work, and civic life. Our nation’s egalitarian ethos notwithstanding, there is a tendency in our culture to diminish the intelligence of those who do manual work, from negative editorial characterizations of nineteenth century laborers to contemporary autoworkers I heard labeled by one supervisor as “a bunch of dummies.” This tendency is amped up in our high-tech era, as anything associated with the “old economy”—from manufacturing to restaurant service—is glibly labeled as “neck-down” work.

            Young people who are interested in working with their hands grow up amidst these commonplace beliefs and utterances, and even in a post-curriculum tracking world, pick up the biases of occupational status in school. At a key developmental juncture, students have to form their sense of self and their conception of their ability within a web of attitudes that diminish the potential richness of work, that lead a promising woodworker to think that nothing he does involves aesthetics.

            This situation might change as computer technology and design are incorporated into some areas of Career and Technical Education (or CTE). And there is increased interest at the policy level to get more young people into trades and mid-level technical occupations, with a favorable push by the President and his Department of Education toward community college certification and degrees. But virtually all the policy talk about Career and Technical Education in briefs, opinion pieces, and speeches is strictly functional and economic: This training will lead to good jobs. You will be hard pressed to find a sentence in all this discourse that addresses intellectual or social growth, or civic participation, or aesthetic judgment, or the involvement in a craft tradition and the ethical stance toward work that tradition can yield.

If we are serious about improving Career and Technical Education and creating more and better pathways into the world of work, then we need to think hard about the deeply ingrained attitudes we have about certain kinds of work, and the public language that issues from those attitudes.

During one of my visits to high school occupational programs, I spent several weeks with a plumbing instructor who had his students doing volunteer work on old houses—low-income projects, women’s shelters—for old houses present a host of plumbing and construction challenges. Students will encounter previous generations of fixtures and layer on layer of repairs. The teacher and his junior crew replaced sinks and toilets and did a variety of repairs that called for troubleshooting and problem solving. The teacher spent much of his time hovering over his students, peppering them with questions, having them explain what they were doing and why, and probing the logic of what they said.

After a long day when I was checking in with him about what I had seen, he began talking about the mental “library” of mechanical knowledge his students were developing, a library of devices and fixtures, how they’re constructed, and how to work with them.

I couldn’t get the teacher’s use of the word “library” out of my mind. It’s not a word you hear used in conjunction with plumbing, yet it fit. The library metaphor suggests that the knowledge these young people are developing is cognitively substantial, emerges out of a tradition, and matters to society. Our culture deems it worthy of study.

From the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, mechanics and engineers developed a variety of picture books and charts that classified and illustrated basic mechanisms and mechanical movements: gear assemblies, for example, or ratchets, or levers and pulleys. These books and charts had names relevant to the present discussion: a “Mechanical Alphabet,” for example, or “Theaters of Machines.” As we continue to try to improve Career and Technical Education, we need to push our thinking by considering CTE in the unfamiliar but generative terms of libraries and alphabets, aesthetics and ethical traditions—for those terms reveal the kinds and range of knowledge inherent in work.

I’m not simply asking for rhetorical flourish; a change in language alone would simply be a semantic do-over. I’m seeking a way to unsettle the limited ways we typically describe the substance and goals of CTE, limitations that reflect our biases about physical work. My hope is that such a shift in understanding would affect the way we teach students in CTE, how we talk to them and about them, and the policy discourse we use to define what they do.

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Unpacking the College-for-All Versus Occupational Training Debate

This commentary originally appeared in Teachers College Record Online on September 20, 2010. I apologize for its length, but it took some space to tease out the many issues in this debate.

***

After decades of effort to undo the rigid system of curricular tracking in the American high school and after the more recent emergence of a “college-for-all” ideology among policy makers and educators, we are witnessing the rise of a strong counter-voice, skeptical about the individual and societal economic value of channeling all young people into post-secondary education.

The skeptics are a diverse group. Many are economists who point to trends in the labor market that reveal a number of good and growing jobs that require some post-secondary training but not a four-year degree. Some are educators (including, but not limited to, Career and Technical Education interest groups) who emphasize the variability of students’ interests and aptitudes, not all of which find fulfillment in the college curriculum. And some are social commentators who blend the economic and educational argument with reflection on the value of direct contact with the physical world, something increasingly remote in our information age. Though these skeptics come from a range of ideological backgrounds, they share a concern that in pushing postsecondary education for everyone, we perpetuate a myth that personal fulfillment and economic security can only be gained by pursuing a college degree.

This debate is an important one and is of interest to me because it directly affects the kinds of students I’ve been concerned with my entire professional life: those who come from less-than-privileged backgrounds and aren’t on the fast track to college. It also catches my attention because a book of mine, The Mind at Work, is sometimes used in the argument against college-for-all.

The Mind at Work is the result of a study of the cognitive demands of physical work, from waitressing and styling hair to carpentry and welding. Our society makes sharp and weighty distinctions—distinctions embodied in curricular tracking—between white collar and blue-collar occupations, between brain work and hand work. But what I demonstrate is the degree to which physical work involves the development of a knowledge base, the application of concept and abstraction, problem solving and troubleshooting, aesthetic consideration and reflection. Hand and brain are cognitively connected.

From these findings I raise questions about our standard definitions of intelligence, the social class biases in those definitions, and their negative effects on education, the organization of work, and America’s political and social dynamics.

Those who use The Mind at Work to champion some type of occupational education over a bachelor’s degree zero in on a core claim of the book: that physical work is cognitively rich, and it is class bias that blinds us from honoring that richness. But I go to some length to tease out the historical and social factors surrounding this core premise, particularly as it plays out in the division between the vocational and the academic course of study. I want to raise these issues again here, and, with the benefit of the time that has passed since the book’s publication, elaborate on them, for the issues can become simplified in the debate between advocates of college-for-all and their skeptics.

It is absolutely true—and anyone who teaches and, for that matter, any parent, knows it—that some young people are just not drawn to the kinds of activities that comprise the typical academic course of study, no matter how well executed. Yet, some of these students are engaged by the topics and tasks found in the vocational curriculum. What is also true is that many of these pursuits are cognitively demanding and can be a source of intellectual growth. Furthermore, they can lead to good jobs that are relatively secure in a fluid global economy. The electrician’s and the chef’s work cannot be outsourced.

The problem is that historically the vocational curriculum itself has not adequately honored the rich intellectual content of work. As the authors of an overview of high school Voc Ed (the earlier name of CTE) from the National Center for Research in Vocational Education put it: vocational education “emphasized job-specific skills to the almost complete exclusion of theoretical content.” And the general education courses—English, history, mathematics—that vocational students took were typically dumbed-down and unimaginative. CTE reforms over the past few decades have gone some way toward changing this state of affairs, but the overall results have been uneven.

The huge question then is this: Is a particular vocationally oriented program built on the cognitive content of work, and does it provide a strong education in the literacy and mathematics, the history and economics, the science and ethics that can emerge from the world of work? Few of the economists I’ve read who advocate an expansion of Career and Technical Education address the educational (versus job training) aspects of their proposals.

Another point that the skeptics make is the troubling record of student success in post-secondary education. Do we really want to urge more students into a system that graduates about 50-60% of those who enter it? The reasons students leave are many: from poor academic preparation to unclear goals to problems with finances and personal life. They leave without a certificate or degree that will help them in the job market, and, depending on the college, they might incur significant debt along the way. The skeptics are right about the unsatisfactory record of student success. But their solution seems to fault students more than the colleges they attend and affords no other option but to redirect students who aren’t thriving into job-training programs.

But we need to be careful about painting this broad group of students with a single brush stroke. Some are strongly motivated but because of poor education, family disruption, residential mobility, or a host of reasons are not academically prepared. The question is what kind of course work and services does the college have to help them. (And it should be noted that many vocational programs recommended by the skeptics would require the same level of academic remediation.) Some students are unsure about their future, are experimenting—and in my experience, it’s not easy to determine in advance who will find their way. We also know that a significant number of students leave college temporarily or permanently for non-academic reasons: finances, child care, job loss. Some of these cases could be addressed with financial aid or other resources and social services. So while I take the skeptics’ point about the poor record of student success and agree that college is not for everyone and that a fulfilling life can be had without it, it is a simplistic solution to funnel everyone who is not thriving into a vocational program.

Such a solution also smacks of injustice. Right at the point in our society when college is being encouraged for a wide sweep of our citizenry, we have the emergence of a restrictive counterforce that is seen by some as an attempt to protect privilege, or, at the least, as an ignorance of social history. Research by sociologists Jennie Brand and Yu Xie demonstrates that those least likely to attend college because of social class position—and thus, on average, having a less privileged education—are the ones who gain the most economically. For such populations, going to college can also provide a measure of social and cultural capital. A long history of exclusion must be addressed before countering broad access to higher education.

All the above raises the basic question: What is the purpose of education? Both the college-for-all advocates and the skeptics justify their positions on economic grounds, but another element in the college-for-all argument is that in addition to enhancing economic mobility, going to college has important intellectual, cultural, and civic benefits as well. These different perspectives on the purpose of college play into—and are shaped by—a long standing tension in American higher education: a conflict between the goal of cultivating intellectual growth and liberal culture versus the goal of preparing students for occupation and practical life. I don’t have the space to adequately discuss the issue of purpose other than to say that I think this tension—like the divide between the academic and vocational—restricts the conversation we should be having. How can we enhance the liberal studies possibilities in a vocational curriculum and enliven and broaden the academic course of study through engagement with the world beyond the classroom?

A third option between college and work has emerged in the last few years: Linked Learning, which is also known by its former name, Multiple Pathways. There are various incarnations of Linked Learning, but a common one is a relatively small school that is theme-based and offers a strong academic curriculum for all students; the students then have options to branch off toward a career, or occupational certification, or a two- or four-year degree.

The college-for-all advocates would applaud the emphasis on a strong academic core but worry that this system could devolve into a new form of tracking. And the college-for-all skeptics, I suspect, would applaud the presence of a vocational pathway, though worry that anti-vocational biases would still stigmatize the option. These are legitimate concerns, and many advocates of the Linked Learning approach acknowledge them. The advocates also admit the significant challenges facing such a reform, from faculty and curriculum development to the ancillary academic and social services needed to provide a quality “pre-pathways” education for all students. Still, this is a promising alternative, and some schools are demonstrating success with it.

Though this college versus work debate can slip into a reductive either/or polemic, it does raise to awareness a number of important issues, ones not only central to education but as well to the economy, the meaning of work, and democratic life. There is the skyrocketing cost of college and the poor record of retention and graduation in higher education. There is the disconnect between the current labor market and the politically popular rhetoric of “educating our way into the new economy.” And there is the significant commitment of financial and human resources that will be needed to make college-for-all a reality.

On a broader scale there is the purpose of education in a free society. We must consider the issue of the variability of human interests and talents and the class-based bias toward entire categories of knowledge and activity—a bias institutionalized in the structure of the American high school. It is important, then, to rethink the academic-vocational divide itself and its post-secondary cousin, the liberal ideal versus the vocational mission of the college. And finally we need to keep in mind that the college-for-all versus work debate takes place within a history of inequality and that the resolution of the debate will involve not only educational and economic issues but civic and moral ones as well.