by Terry Heick
The impact of Berry on my life– and hence inseparably from my teaching and understanding– has been immeasurable. His concepts on scale, restrictions, accountability, community, and careful thinking have a place in larger conversations concerning economic climate, society, and vocation, otherwise national politics, religion, and anywhere else where good sense stops working to linger.
However what concerning education?
Below is a letter Berry composed in action to a require a ‘much shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the debate up to him, but it has me wondering if this sort of reasoning may have an area in new understanding types.
When we urge, in education, to go after ‘undoubtedly good’ things, what are we missing out on?
That is, as adherence to outcomes-based understanding practices with tight placement in between criteria, discovering targets, and analyses, with cautious scripting horizontally and vertically, no ‘spaces’– what assumption is embedded in this insistence? Since in the high-stakes video game of public education and learning, each people jointly is ‘done in.’
And extra right away, are we preparing students for ‘great,’ or merely academic fluency? Which is the duty of public education?
If we tended in the direction of the former, what evidence would we see in our class and universities?
And perhaps most significantly, are they mutually special?
Wendell Berry on ‘Great’
The Modern , in the September concern, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the short article by John de Graaf (“Much Less Work, More Life”), uses “less job” and a 30 -hour workweek as demands that are as undeniable as the need to eat.
Though I would support the concept of a 30 -hour workweek in some situations, I see absolutely nothing absolute or unassailable regarding it. It can be suggested as a global requirement only after desertion of any type of regard for job and the replacement of discussion by slogans.
It holds true that the automation of virtually all kinds of manufacturing and solution has filled up the globe with “work” that are meaningless, undermining, and boring– in addition to naturally harmful. I don’t believe there is a good disagreement for the existence of such job, and I yearn for its removal, however also its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, not to mention advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, up until now as I recognize, has generated a reliable difference in between good work and negative job. To shorten the “main workweek” while granting the extension of negative job is very little of a service.
The old and ethical idea of “vocation” is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a sort of great for which we are especially fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently surprising possibility that we could work voluntarily, and that there is no needed opposition between work and happiness or satisfaction.
Just in the absence of any kind of practical idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction suggested in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life equilibrium,” as if one commutes daily from life below to function there.
However aren’t we living also when we are most badly and harmfully at the office?
And isn’t that specifically why we object (when we do things) to bad work?
And if you are contacted us to songs or farming or woodworking or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your abilities well and to a good function and as a result more than happy or pleased in your job, why should you always do much less of it?
More important, why should you think of your life as distinct from it?
And why should you not be affronted by some main decree that you should do less of it?
A valuable discussion on the topic of work would raise a number of inquiries that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:
What work are we speaking about?
Did you select your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the method to earn money?
Just how much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill, and your pride is utilized in your work?
Do you value the product or the solution that is the outcome of your work?
For whom do you function: a supervisor, an employer, or on your own?
What are the ecological and social prices of your work?
If such inquiries are not asked, then we have no other way of seeing or continuing past the presumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all job is bad job; that all employees are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on companies; that job and life are irreconcilable; which the only service to poor job is to reduce the workweek and hence split the badness among more individuals.
I don’t assume any person can honorably challenge the proposition, in theory, that it is much better “to lower hours rather than give up employees.” Yet this raises the possibility of reduced earnings and consequently of less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can provide just “welfare,” one of the commercial economic climate’s more breakable “safety nets.”
And what are people mosting likely to finish with the “even more life” that is understood to be the outcome of “much less job”? Mr. de Graaf states that they “will certainly work out much more, rest a lot more, yard extra, spend even more time with loved ones, and drive less.” This happy vision descends from the recommendation, prominent not as long back, that in the spare time acquired by the acquisition of “labor-saving gadgets,” people would certainly buy collections, museums, and symphony orchestras.
But suppose the liberated workers drive more
What happens if they recreate themselves with off-road cars, quick motorboats, fast food, computer games, tv, digital “interaction,” and the numerous genres of pornography?
Well, that’ll be “life,” apparently, and anything beats work.
Mr. de Graaf makes the additional uncertain presumption that job is a fixed amount, dependably offered, and divisible into dependably enough portions. This supposes that one of the functions of the commercial economic situation is to provide work to employees. On the contrary, among the objectives of this economy has always been to change independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into staff members, and then to make use of the workers as inexpensively as feasible, and afterwards to replace them asap with technical replacements.
So there can be fewer working hours to separate, a lot more employees amongst whom to split them, and fewer welfare to use up the slack.
On the other hand, there is a great deal of job needing to be done– environment and landmark restoration, improved transport networks, much healthier and much safer food production, dirt preservation, etc– that nobody yet wants to pay for. One way or another, such job will have to be done.
We may wind up functioning much longer workdays in order not to “live,” but to survive.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry s letter originally appeared in The Modern (November 2010 in reaction to the post “Less Work, More Life.” This post initially appeared on Utne