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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