by Terry Heick
The impact of Berry on my life– and therefore inseparably from my mentor and understanding– has been immeasurable. His concepts on range, restrictions, liability, neighborhood, and cautious thinking have a place in bigger conversations about economy, culture, and job, otherwise politics, faith, and anyplace else where common sense falls short to stick around.
However what about education and learning?
Below is a letter Berry wrote in feedback to an ask for a ‘shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the debate as much as him, but it has me wondering if this sort of reasoning might have an area in new knowing forms.
When we insist, in education, to go after ‘undoubtedly great’ points, what are we missing out on?
That is, as adherence to outcomes-based discovering practices with tight placement between standards, learning targets, and evaluations, with cautious scripting horizontally and up and down, no ‘voids’– what assumption is embedded in this insistence? Since in the high-stakes game of public education, each people jointly is ‘done in.’
And a lot more instantly, are we preparing learners for ‘good work,’ or just academic fluency? Which is the function of public education?
If we often tended in the direction of the former, what evidence would we see in our classrooms and universities?
And possibly most notably, are they mutually special?
Wendell Berry on ‘Great’
The Modern , in the September problem, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the article by John de Graaf (“Less Work, Even More Life”), uses “much less job” and a 30 -hour workweek as demands that are as unassailable as the demand to consume.
Though I would certainly sustain the idea of a 30 -hour workweek in some situations, I see absolutely nothing absolute or undeniable concerning it. It can be recommended as an universal demand only after abandonment of any kind of respect for vocation and the replacement of discussion by mottos.
It is true that the automation of essentially all types of manufacturing and service has actually filled up the world with “tasks” that are useless, undermining, and boring– in addition to naturally destructive. I do not believe there is a good debate for the existence of such work, and I wish for its removal, however even its decrease requires economic modifications not yet specified, not to mention advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, until now as I understand, has actually generated a trustworthy difference in between great and negative work. To reduce the “main workweek” while consenting to the continuation of bad work is very little of a remedy.
The old and ethical concept of “occupation” is just that we each are called, by God, or by our presents, or by our preference, to a type of great for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this concept is the obviously surprising possibility that we may work voluntarily, and that there is no necessary contradiction in between job and happiness or satisfaction.
Only in the absence of any viable idea of job or great can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “much less work, even more life” or “work-life equilibrium,” as if one commutes daily from life below to function there.
Yet aren’t we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at the office?
And isn’t that specifically why we object (when we do things) to poor work?
And if you are phoned call to music or farming or woodworking or recovery, if you make your living by your calls, if you use your abilities well and to a good objective and consequently more than happy or completely satisfied in your work, why should you always do less of it?
More vital, why should you think about your life as distinctive from it?
And why should you not be affronted by some official mandate that you should do much less of it?
A helpful discourse on the subject of work would certainly increase a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has ignored to ask:
What work are we discussing?
Did you select your job, or are you doing it under compulsion as the method to generate income?
How much of your knowledge, your affection, your ability, and your satisfaction is used in your work?
Do you appreciate the item or the service that is the outcome of your work?
For whom do you work: a supervisor, a boss, or yourself?
What are the ecological and social costs of your job?
If such questions are not asked, after that we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life specialists: that all work is bad job; that all workers are sadly and even helplessly depending on companies; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only service to poor job is to shorten the workweek and thus split the badness among more individuals.
I don’t assume anyone can fairly challenge the proposal, in theory, that it is much better “to reduce hours rather than give up workers.” Yet this raises the chance of reduced earnings and therefore of less “life.” As a solution for this, Mr. de Graaf can supply just “unemployment benefits,” among the industrial economic situation’s even more fragile “safeguard.”
And what are people mosting likely to make with the “more life” that is recognized to be the outcome of “much less work”? Mr. de Graaf states that they “will work out extra, rest much more, garden much more, spend even more time with family and friends, and drive much less.” This pleased vision descends from the proposal, popular not so long earlier, that in the leisure obtained by the acquisition of “labor-saving devices,” people would buy from libraries, galleries, and symphony orchestras.
Yet suppose the liberated employees drive more
What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, convenience food, computer games, tv, electronic “communication,” and the numerous styles of porn?
Well, that’ll be “life,” allegedly, and anything defeats work.
Mr. de Graaf makes the additional uncertain presumption that job is a static amount, dependably offered, and divisible right into dependably adequate parts. This supposes that of the functions of the industrial economic situation is to give employment to workers. On the contrary, among the objectives of this economy has constantly been to transform independent farmers, store owners, and tradespeople right into employees, and then to utilize the employees as inexpensively as possible, and after that to change them as soon as possible with technical replacements.
So there can be fewer working hours to split, extra workers amongst whom to divide them, and less unemployment insurance to use up the slack.
On the various other hand, there is a lot of job requiring to be done– ecological community and landmark restoration, enhanced transportation networks, healthier and much safer food production, soil conservation, and so on– that no one yet agrees to spend for. Eventually, such work will need to be done.
We may wind up functioning much longer workdays in order not to “live,” but to make it through.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry s letter initially showed up in The Dynamic (November 2010 in response to the write-up “Less Job, Even More Life.” This article originally showed up on Utne