Interrupted knowledge transmission
Mike Rowe, known for his work on Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch, joined me for an interview about the trades and a gap in vocational skills earlier this month during Chronfest. Rowe said something during the interview that resonated with me:
“When I was in high school, it wasn’t called ‘shop,’ it wasn’t even called ‘vo-tech.’ It was called the ‘Industrial Arts,’” he said. “The first thing we did on the long road to getting shop out of high school was we took the art out of vocation.”
Skills that had once been valued and passed down by craftsmen have become reduced to mere drudgery, Rowe contended. “That’s when it started to unravel. We identified the most aspirational element of a carpenter’s job, or a rodbuster or metalworker’s job — the artistry of it, the beauty of it — and we just arbitraged it right out. And now we’ve got a skills gap and we’re scratching our heads, wondering, How do we elevate these trades again?”
True to his role as troubadour of the tradesmen, Rowe may be sentimentalizing a bit. But I, too, see that gap in craftsmanship every day in Baltimore, where I live (and, incidentally, where Rowe grew up). Charm City never went through the sort of urban renewal that reduced most of the historic buildings to parking lots in my hometown, Minneapolis. Here in Baltimore, you still see building after building displaying ornate brickwork, detailed wood moldings and cornices, and intricate slatework on the roofs, like in the photo below — and you realize that it’s hard to find people who know how to build with old brick, wood, or slate like this anymore. When a friend of mine led the renovation of a historic building in the Baltimore area, he had to hire a plaster craftsman from Ireland to fix the interior walls, because he couldn’t find anyone with those skills here.
I’ve been thinking about this as one example of a break in the “intergenerational transmission” of knowledge, as Zachary Stein, an educational futurist I’ve been following recently, might put it. That loss of knowledge about how to, say, lay a slate roof also more broadly afflicts our knowledge of how to build cities, grow food, and maintain other crucial infrastructure, which has big implications for how we can navigate the future. Knowing how water gets into your bathroom toilet and how the poop goes out surely helps the handy homeowner install and maintain that key fixture of the modern home. But knowledge of plumbing can also be a gateway to a deeper understanding of civic or environmental problems, particularly if you adopt a systems-thinking approach, which refers to a discipline that examines the relationships between essential parts of an organization or a problem. Plumbing, then, offers a lens on how buildings are tied to complex city services, or how people can process human waste using methods that don’t involve precious water. (Those topics are not distant theory in Baltimore, where the city’s aging sewer infrastructure is failing.)
Stein, who focuses on education’s role in maintaining civilization, is interested in practical skills, to be sure. But when he talks about a break in intergenerational transmission, he is more often talking about it in the context of modern tech and mass education. He envisions a possible future where the millennia-long “sacred transmission of socialization” — the lessons on humanity, history, civics, and value that get passed from adult to child, from one generation to the next — is taken over by pervasive social media, digital-learning platforms, and other technology, owned and operated by large corporations or government, powered by AI and predatory algorithms, and harnessed for consumerism and propaganda.
“There’s this idea that we move towards what I’ve been calling ‘artificial-intelligence-enabled socialization systems,’ which in the long run make obsolete human-to-human socialization,” Stein said on one podcast, and “therefore present a deeply disturbing speciation event where we have for the first time in history a generation raised primarily through relationship to machine.”
One can see parallels between some of the challenges facing higher education and those confronting the trades. To some extent, Rowe is right that decades ago some trades and practical skills declined because they got bad PR and weren’t seen as practical in an emerging “information age.” But many of these skills were also lost with technological innovations and the use of cheaper, easier-to-install (and often less durable and sustainable) materials in construction and other trades — asphalt shingles instead of slate, preformed click-in vinyl molding instead of wood, Ikea cabinetry instead of custom shelves. Over time, products like these put economic pressure on the craftsmen as they simplify, or dumb down, the work, often in the name of efficiency: Who needs a third-generation plaster artisan, a budget-conscious foreman might ask, when nearly anyone can hang drywall?
Sadly, many of Baltimore’s old buildings are abandoned, boarded up, and rotting — falling not to urban renewal, but to poverty, neglect, and segregation. (Baltimore may have been an early “proving ground” for the discriminatory practice of “redlining.” The neighborhoods that continue to suffer today are largely the same ones given low grades based on race by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s.)
As the cost of housing rose nationally over the past two decades, I had always thought that Baltimore would experience a revival among artists, urban homesteaders, and DIYers. After all, you can buy a Baltimore rowhome for as little as $10,000. But that renaissance hasn’t really happened. One reason: The knowledge needed to renovate some of these buildings would be daunting for even a committed weekend warrior. Because those practical skills are in short supply in the general population, as Rowe and others point out, our ability as a populace to help our own communities is limited.
Another reason: Crumbling brick and mortar is hardly the only challenge in Baltimore, a city that has inspired more than a few books, television series, movies, and documentary films about police misconduct, racism, political corruption, and urban poverty and decay. American communities like these need more than a robust corps of tradesmen. They need young leaders who have the ability to communicate across cultural boundaries, who are informed on the history and can imagine the implications for the future, and who can craft enduring political, educational, civic, and artistic infrastructure.
Much of that training is found in the humanities, social sciences, and the fine arts — the very disciplines that many institutions are diminishing or cutting, because they are not seen as practical by parents and students. The current crop of students seem intellectually disengaged anyway, and their professors note that they don’t read books anymore — not even for pleasure. Several professors have told me recently that they blame the phones and TikTok.
Take Rowe and Stein together, and you have a real conundrum. It’s one thing when you can’t find a good plumber or roofer to fix your house. When we discover we have a shortage of people who have the knowledge to fix our schools, our government, and our society, we’ll have a truly daunting skills gap.
Want to read more?
If you enjoyed this column, you will probably like my forthcoming book, written with Ned Laff, called Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does. Systems thinking is a major undercurrent of the book, and we devote a chapter to discussing the value of the liberal arts. (Hint: It goes way beyond “soft skills.”)
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