461Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the artisan, finding him too narrow in his co(?) to be moved by the public good.
18
462From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the "ways" of one's materials--that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception. At the beginning of the western tradition, Sophia (wisdom) meant skill for Homer; the technical skill of a carpenter, for example. Through pragmatic engagement, the carpenter learns the different species of wood, then fitness for such needs as load bearing and water holding, their dimensional stability with changes in the weather, and their varying resistance to rot and insects. The carpenter also gains a knowledge of universals, such as the right angle, the plumb, and the level, which are indispensable for sound construction. It is in the crafts that nature first becomes a thematic object for study, and that study is grounded by a regard for human activity.
21-22
463Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatic (?) on the basis of a few observances.
23
464I take their point to be that a realistic solution must include ad hoc constants known only through practice, that is, through embodied manipulations. Those constants cannot be arrived at deductively, starting form mathematical entities> These experiments with origami help us to understand why certain aspects of mechanical work cannot be reduce to rule following.
24
465Mike Rose--Surgery as technical and deliberate. Stochastic arts.
25
466The motivation previously supplied by the intrinsic satisfactions of manual work was to be replaced with ideology; industrial arts education now concerned itself with moral formation. Leans writes that "American craft publicists, by treating craftsmanship ... as an agent of socialization, abandoned the effort to revive pleasurable labor. Manual training meant specialized assembly line preparation for the lower classes ands educational or recreational experiences for the bourgeoise.
31
467Scientific management
35-39
468It is not always the imperatives of profit that drive the alienation of judgment from professionals, sometimes it is a matter of public policy. Standardized tests remove a teacher's discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging. It seems to be our liberal political instincts that push us into this direction of centralizing authority; we distrust authority in the hands of individuals. With its reverence for neutral process, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility.
45
469One of the principles of contemporary management is to "push details down and pull credit up." et seq.
50
470Creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice.
51
471Crawford on musicians
64
472Mastery of a stochastic art is compatible with failure to achieve its end (health). As Aristotle writes "It does not belong to medicine to produce health, but only to promote it as much as possible."
The things they but are not of their own making.
81
473In diagnosing and fixing things made by others, one is confronted with obscurities and must remain constantly open to the signs by which they reveal themselves. This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgments. This is easier said than done.
82
474Chris Murdoch writes that good art "often seems to us as mysterious because it resists the easy patterns of the fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art. Since they are the recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream. Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision."
93
475Corporations portray themselves as results-based and performance oriented, but where there isn't anything material being produced, objective standards for job performance are hard to come by. What is a manager to do? He is encouraged to direct his attention to the states of minds of working, and become a sort of therapist.
127
476Whatever the cause, the worker's failing is sitting on the bench, staring both parties in the face, and this object is likely to be the focal point of the conversation. But in the last 30 years American businesses have shifted their focus from the production of goods (now done elsewhere) to the projection of brands, that is, the states of minds in the customer, and this shift finds its correlate in the production of mentalities in workers.
127
477David Labaree, How to Succeed in School without really Learning. The credential race in American Education.
145
478The characteristic form of address on a job site is command. In the office, Jordall writes, "managers' acute sense of organizational contingency makes them speak gingerly to one another since the person one criticizes or argues with today could be one's boss tomorrow...moreover, the crucial premium in the corporation on style includes an expectation of a certain finesse in handling people, a "sensitivity to others" as it's called. As one manager says "You can't just push people around anymore." Discreet suggestions, hints, and coded messages take the place of command; this, of course, places a premium on subordinates ability to read their bosses' vaguely articulated or completely unstated wishes.
157-158
479On apprenticeship/master relationship
159
480The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: "Knowing that," as opposed to "Knowing how." This corresponds roughly to universal language as the kind that comes form individual experience.
161
481Occupations based on universal, propositional knowledge are more prestigious, but they are also the kind that face competition from the whole market as book learning becomes more widely disseminated in the global economy. Practical know-how, on the other hand, is always tied to the experience of a particular person...it can't be downloaded, it can only be lived.
162
482The degradation of work is often based on efforts to replace the intuitive judgments of practitioners with rule following, and codify knowledge into abstract symbols that then stand in for situated knowledge.
167
486Yet, as Murray argues, the experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students. Those who struggle academically experience failure all the time, and probably write off attempts to sugar-goat it with "self-esteem" as another example of how deranged adults can be. But the praising of gifted students for being smart, by parents and teachers, has a far more pernicious effect, especially when such praise is combined with the grade inflation and soft curriculum that are notorious in elite schools. A student can avoid the hard sciences and foreign languages and get a degree without ever having the unambiguous experience of being wrong.
204
485To be able of sustaining our interest, a job has to have room for progress in excellence.
195
484Classic philosophy experiment--reward vs work.
194-195
483The fact that a firefighter's knowledge is tacit rather than explicit, and therefore not capable of articulation, means that he is not able to give an account of himself to the larger society. he is not able to make a claim for the value of his mind in the terms that prevail, and may come to doubt it himself. But his own experience provides grounds for a radical critique of the view that theoretical knowledge is the only true knowledge.
171
