by Terry Heick
The impact of Berry on my life– and therefore inseparably from my mentor and discovering– has been countless. His concepts on range, limitations, liability, area, and cautious reasoning have an area in bigger discussions regarding economy, culture, and occupation, otherwise national politics, religious beliefs, and everywhere else where sound judgment falls short to linger.
Yet what concerning education and learning?
Below is a letter Berry composed in response to an ask for a ‘much shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the argument up to him, but it has me questioning if this kind of reasoning may have a place in brand-new understanding forms.
When we insist, in education, to seek ‘clearly great’ points, what are we missing out on?
That is, as adherence to outcomes-based discovering experiment tight placement in between standards, finding out targets, and analyses, with cautious scripting horizontally and vertically, no ‘spaces’– what assumption is installed in this persistence? Because in the high-stakes video game of public education, each of us jointly is ‘done in.’
And much more promptly, are we preparing students for ‘good work,’ or just scholastic fluency? Which is the role of public education and learning?
If we often tended towards the previous, what proof would we see in our classrooms and colleges?
And possibly most significantly, are they mutually exclusive?
Wendell Berry on ‘Good Work’
The Dynamic , in the September problem, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the write-up by John de Graaf (“Much Less Work, More Life”), provides “less work” and a 30 -hour workweek as needs that are as undeniable as the need to eat.
Though I would support the concept of a 30 -hour workweek in some circumstances, I see nothing absolute or unassailable concerning it. It can be proposed as a global demand only after abandonment of any respect for job and the replacement of discourse by mottos.
It is true that the automation of virtually all types of manufacturing and solution has loaded the world with “work” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring– as well as inherently damaging. I don’t think there is an excellent argument for the existence of such job, and I yearn for its elimination, yet even its decrease calls for financial adjustments not yet specified, not to mention advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, until now as I recognize, has generated a trusted difference in between good work and poor work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the extension of negative job is very little of a service.
The old and ethical idea of “occupation” is merely that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a type of great for which we are especially fitted. Implicit in this concept is the seemingly shocking possibility that we might function willingly, which there is no required opposition in between work and happiness or contentment.
Only in the lack of any kind of viable idea of occupation or great can one make the difference implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life equilibrium,” as if one commutes daily from life here to function there.
But aren’t we living even when we are most badly and harmfully at the workplace?
And isn’t that exactly why we object (when we do item) to bad job?
And if you are called to songs or farming or woodworking or healing, if you make your living by your calls, if you use your skills well and to a good objective and therefore are happy or pleased in your work, why should you necessarily do much less of it?
More vital, why should you think about your life as unique from it?
And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do much less of it?
A valuable discussion on the topic of work would certainly raise a variety of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:
What job are we speaking about?
Did you pick your job, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?
Just how much of your knowledge, your love, your ability, and your pride is used in your job?
Do you appreciate the product or the service that is the result of your work?
For whom do you function: a manager, a boss, or yourself?
What are the ecological and social prices of your work?
If such questions are not asked, then we have no other way of seeing or continuing past the presumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life professionals: that all work misbehaves work; that all workers are sadly and even helplessly depending on companies; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only option to poor work is to reduce the workweek and thus separate the badness among even more individuals.
I do not think any person can fairly challenge the proposition, theoretically, that it is better “to decrease hours rather than lay off workers.” Yet this elevates the possibility of lower earnings and as a result of much less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can provide just “unemployment insurance,” one of the industrial economy’s even more vulnerable “safety nets.”
And what are individuals mosting likely to perform with the “even more life” that is understood to be the outcome of “much less job”? Mr. de Graaf claims that they “will certainly work out extra, rest more, yard much more, invest more time with family and friends, and drive less.” This satisfied vision comes down from the suggestion, prominent not so long earlier, that in the spare time gotten by the acquisition of “labor-saving tools,” people would patronize collections, museums, and symphony orchestras.
Yet what if the liberated workers drive a lot more
What happens if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, quickly motorboats, convenience food, computer games, tv, digital “communication,” and the different styles of pornography?
Well, that’ll be “life,” apparently, and anything defeats job.
Mr. de Graaf makes the additional skeptical presumption that job is a fixed quantity, reliably readily available, and divisible into dependably sufficient parts. This means that a person of the purposes of the commercial economic situation is to supply employment to workers. As a matter of fact, one of the functions of this economic climate has constantly been to change independent farmers, storekeepers, and tradespeople right into staff members, and afterwards to use the workers as inexpensively as possible, and afterwards to change them asap with technical replacements.
So there can be fewer working hours to separate, more employees among whom to divide them, and less unemployment insurance to take up the slack.
On the various other hand, there is a great deal of work needing to be done– environment and landmark restoration, improved transportation networks, healthier and safer food manufacturing, soil conservation, and so on– that no one yet is willing to pay for. One way or another, such work will have to be done.
We may end up functioning much longer workdays in order not to “live,” yet to endure.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry s letter initially appeared in The Dynamic (November 2010 in action to the post “Less Job, Even More Life.” This article initially appeared on Utne