by Terry Heick
The influence of Berry on my life– and hence inseparably from my training and knowing– has been countless. His ideas on scale, limitations, accountability, neighborhood, and careful reasoning have an area in bigger discussions regarding economy, society, and occupation, if not national politics, religion, and anyplace else where good sense fails to stick around.
But what regarding education and learning?
Below is a letter Berry wrote in response to a require a ‘much shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the disagreement approximately him, but it has me questioning if this type of reasoning may have a place in new learning forms.
When we insist, in education, to go after ‘obviously excellent’ things, what are we missing?
That is, as adherence to outcomes-based understanding exercise with limited placement between criteria, learning targets, and evaluations, with cautious scripting horizontally and up and down, no ‘gaps’– what assumption is installed in this persistence? Due to the fact that in the high-stakes game of public education, each of us jointly is ‘done in.’
And more immediately, are we preparing learners for ‘good work,’ or simply academic fluency? Which is the duty of public education?
If we had a tendency towards the former, what evidence would certainly we see in our class and universities?
And maybe most importantly, are they mutually unique?
Wendell Berry on ‘Great’
The Dynamic , in the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the post by John de Graaf (“Less Job, More Life”), supplies “much less job” and a 30 -hour workweek as demands that are as indisputable as the demand to consume.
Though I would certainly support the concept of a 30 -hour workweek in some situations, I see nothing outright or undeniable about it. It can be recommended as an universal requirement just after abandonment of any kind of respect for occupation and the replacement of discourse by slogans.
It holds true that the automation of essentially all kinds of manufacturing and service has actually filled the globe with “tasks” that are worthless, demeaning, and boring– as well as naturally devastating. I don’t assume there is an excellent argument for the existence of such work, and I long for its removal, however even its reduction asks for economic adjustments not yet defined, not to mention advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, so far as I recognize, has created a reliable difference in between great and poor work. To reduce the “official workweek” while granting the extension of bad work is not much of a solution.
The old and respectable concept of “vocation” is merely that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of great for which we are specifically fitted. Implicit in this concept is the seemingly surprising opportunity that we might function voluntarily, which there is no essential opposition between job and happiness or fulfillment.
Just in the lack of any type of viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction suggested in such phrases as “much less work, more life” or “work-life equilibrium,” as if one commutes daily from life right here to work there.
However aren’t we living even when we are most badly and harmfully at work?
And isn’t that precisely why we object (when we do object) to bad work?
And if you are phoned call to songs or farming or carpentry or recovery, if you make your living by your calls, if you use your skills well and to an excellent function and as a result are happy or completely satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do much less of it?
More crucial, why should you consider your life as distinctive from it?
And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do less of it?
A useful discourse on the topic of work would certainly increase a variety of inquiries that Mr. de Graaf has disregarded to ask:
What work are we talking about?
Did you select your work, or are you doing it under obsession as the way to generate income?
Just how much of your knowledge, your love, your ability, and your satisfaction is employed in your job?
Do you appreciate the item or the solution that is the outcome of your work?
For whom do you function: a manager, an employer, or on your own?
What are the environmental and social expenses of your work?
If such concerns are not asked, after that we have no way of seeing or continuing past the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life professionals: that all job is bad job; that all workers are unhappily and also helplessly based on employers; that job and life are intransigent; and that the only solution to bad job is to shorten the workweek and therefore separate the badness amongst even more individuals.
I don’t think anybody can honorably challenge the suggestion, in theory, that it is better “to reduce hours instead of lay off workers.” But this elevates the likelihood of reduced revenue and consequently of much less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can offer only “unemployment benefits,” one of the industrial economic climate’s even more fragile “safety nets.”
And what are people mosting likely to make with the “more life” that is understood to be the outcome of “less work”? Mr. de Graaf says that they “will certainly exercise extra, rest more, garden extra, spend even more time with loved ones, and drive much less.” This satisfied vision descends from the recommendation, prominent not as long ago, that in the spare time gotten by the purchase of “labor-saving tools,” people would buy from collections, museums, and chamber orchestra.
Yet what happens if the liberated workers drive a lot more
What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, junk food, video game, television, electronic “communication,” and the various categories of porn?
Well, that’ll be “life,” apparently, and anything beats work.
Mr. de Graaf makes the more doubtful assumption that work is a fixed amount, dependably offered, and divisible right into reliably enough sections. This means that of the objectives of the industrial economic climate is to provide employment to employees. As a matter of fact, one of the functions of this economic climate has always been to transform independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into workers, and then to make use of the workers as inexpensively as possible, and afterwards to change them asap with technical substitutes.
So there might be fewer functioning hours to divide, a lot more employees amongst whom to separate them, and fewer unemployment benefits to occupy the slack.
On the various other hand, there is a lot of work requiring to be done– ecosystem and landmark repair, enhanced transportation networks, healthier and safer food manufacturing, dirt preservation, and so on– that nobody yet is willing to pay for. One way or another, such work will certainly need to be done.
We may wind up functioning longer workdays in order not to “live,” however to endure.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry s letter originally appeared in The Dynamic (November 2010 in response to the post “Much less Work, Even More Life.” This article originally appeared on Utne