by Terry Heick
The impact of Berry on my life– and hence inseparably from my mentor and knowing– has been countless. His ideas on range, restrictions, accountability, area, and careful thinking have a place in larger conversations regarding economy, culture, and occupation, if not national politics, religious beliefs, and everywhere else where common sense stops working to linger.
However what about education?
Below is a letter Berry composed in reaction to a require a ‘shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the debate approximately him, but it has me asking yourself if this kind of thinking might have a location in new discovering kinds.
When we urge, in education, to go after ‘obviously great’ things, what are we missing?
That is, as adherence to outcomes-based knowing exercise with limited positioning in between criteria, discovering targets, and analyses, with mindful scripting flat and vertically, no ‘spaces’– what assumption is embedded in this persistence? Since in the high-stakes video game of public education, each of us jointly is ‘all in.’
And a lot more right away, are we preparing learners for ‘great,’ or simply scholastic fluency? Which is the role of public education and learning?
If we had a tendency in the direction of the former, what proof would we see in our classrooms and colleges?
And perhaps most significantly, are they mutually special?
Wendell Berry on ‘Great’
The Progressive , in the September concern, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the short article by John de Graaf (“Much Less Work, Even More Life”), uses “much less work” and a 30 -hour workweek as needs that are as undeniable as the demand to consume.
Though I would certainly sustain the idea of a 30 -hour workweek in some circumstances, I see absolutely nothing absolute or indisputable about it. It can be proposed as a global demand only after desertion of any kind of respect for job and the substitute of discourse by slogans.
It is true that the automation of essentially all kinds of manufacturing and solution has filled up the globe with “work” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring– along with naturally devastating. I do not think there is a good debate for the existence of such job, and I want its elimination, yet even its reduction asks for economic changes not yet defined, not to mention supported, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, thus far as I recognize, has created a reputable difference between great and bad work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the extension of bad work is very little of a solution.
The old and ethical idea of “occupation” is just that we each are called, by God, or by our presents, or by our preference, to a sort of great for which we are especially fitted. Implicit in this concept is the evidently surprising opportunity that we might function voluntarily, which there is no essential opposition in between work and joy or complete satisfaction.
Only in the absence of any type of sensible idea of job or good work can one make the difference implied in such phrases as “much less work, more life” or “work-life equilibrium,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.
Yet aren’t we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?
And isn’t that specifically why we object (when we do things) to bad work?
And if you are called to songs or farming or carpentry or recovery, if you make your living by your calls, if you use your abilities well and to a great objective and for that reason are happy or pleased in your job, why should you necessarily do much less of it?
More crucial, why should you think about your life as distinctive from it?
And why should you not be affronted by some main decree that you should do less of it?
A useful discourse on the topic of work would certainly elevate a variety of concerns that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:
What job are we talking about?
Did you choose your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?
How much of your intelligence, your love, your skill, and your satisfaction is used in your work?
Do you value the product or the service that is the outcome of your work?
For whom do you function: a manager, a boss, or yourself?
What are the environmental and social expenses of your work?
If such concerns are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or continuing beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all work misbehaves job; that all employees are unhappily and even helplessly depending on employers; that job and life are intransigent; and that the only option to negative work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among even more people.
I do not think anyone can honorably object to the suggestion, in theory, that it is much better “to minimize hours as opposed to give up employees.” However this elevates the probability of lower earnings and for that reason of much less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can supply just “unemployment benefits,” one of the commercial economy’s even more vulnerable “safeguard.”
And what are individuals mosting likely to do with the “more life” that is recognized to be the outcome of “less job”? Mr. de Graaf says that they “will exercise much more, rest extra, yard a lot more, invest even more time with friends and family, and drive less.” This satisfied vision comes down from the proposal, preferred not so long ago, that in the extra time acquired by the purchase of “labor-saving devices,” people would buy collections, museums, and chamber orchestra.
But suppose the liberated workers drive much more
What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, quick motorboats, convenience food, video game, television, digital “interaction,” and the numerous styles of pornography?
Well, that’ll be “life,” supposedly, and anything beats work.
Mr. de Graaf makes the more doubtful presumption that work is a static quantity, reliably available, and divisible right into reliably adequate portions. This means that of the purposes of the commercial economy is to supply work to workers. However, one of the objectives of this economy has constantly been to change independent farmers, storekeepers, and tradespeople right into workers, and after that to use the employees as cheaply as possible, and afterwards to replace them as soon as possible with technical alternatives.
So there can be less functioning hours to split, a lot more employees among whom to divide them, and fewer welfare to occupy the slack.
On the various other hand, there is a lot of work requiring to be done– community and watershed repair, boosted transport networks, healthier and more secure food production, soil preservation, and so on– that nobody yet agrees to pay for. One way or another, such work will need to be done.
We may end up functioning much longer days in order not to “live,” however to survive.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry s letter initially appeared in The Progressive (November 2010 in response to the post “Less Work, Even More Life.” This post initially appeared on Utne