by Terry Heick
The impact of Berry on my life– and hence inseparably from my training and understanding– has actually been countless. His concepts on scale, limitations, accountability, area, and careful thinking have a location in bigger conversations about economy, society, and vocation, if not politics, religion, and everywhere else where good sense falls short to stick around.
But what about education and learning?
Below is a letter Berry composed in action to an ask for a ‘shorter workweek.’ I’ll leave the argument approximately him, but it has me questioning if this kind of reasoning might have an area in new knowing forms.
When we insist, in education and learning, to seek ‘obviously excellent’ things, what are we missing?
That is, as adherence to outcomes-based knowing experiment tight placement in between criteria, discovering targets, and assessments, with careful scripting horizontally and up and down, no ‘spaces’– what presumption is embedded in this insistence? Because in the high-stakes game of public education and learning, each of us jointly is ‘done in.’
And extra instantly, are we preparing students for ‘good work,’ or just academic fluency? Which is the function of public education and learning?
If we tended in the direction of the previous, what proof would certainly we see in our class and colleges?
And perhaps most importantly, are they mutually exclusive?
Wendell Berry on ‘Great’
The Progressive , in the September problem, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the write-up by John de Graaf (“Less Job, Even More Life”), supplies “much less work” and a 30 -hour workweek as requirements that are as indisputable as the requirement to consume.
Though I would certainly sustain the concept of a 30 -hour workweek in some circumstances, I see absolutely nothing outright or indisputable about it. It can be recommended as an universal demand just after abandonment of any regard for occupation and the substitute of discourse by mottos.
It is true that the automation of basically all forms of manufacturing and service has actually filled the globe with “jobs” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring– as well as naturally harmful. I do not assume there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I yearn for its elimination, but even its reduction requires financial modifications not yet specified, not to mention promoted, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, so far as I know, has actually created a trusted difference in between good work and bad work. To reduce the “official workweek” while granting the continuation of negative work is very little of a solution.
The old and honorable concept of “occupation” is just that we each are called, by God, or by our presents, or by our preference, to a type of good work for which we are specifically fitted. Implicit in this concept is the evidently shocking opportunity that we may function voluntarily, which there is no required contradiction in between work and happiness or complete satisfaction.
Just in the lack of any kind of sensible idea of occupation or good work can one make the distinction indicated in such expressions as “less job, 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 the office?
And isn’t that specifically why we object (when we do things) to poor job?
And if you are called to songs or farming or woodworking or recovery, if you make your living by your calls, if you use your abilities well and to an excellent purpose and therefore 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 distinctive from it?
And why should you not be affronted by some main decree that you should do much less of it?
A valuable discourse on the subject of work would certainly elevate a variety of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:
What work are we talking about?
Did you choose your job, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to make money?
How much of your intelligence, your love, your ability, and your satisfaction is used in your work?
Do you value the item or the solution that is the outcome of your work?
For whom do you work: a manager, a boss, or on your own?
What are the ecological and social prices of your job?
If such questions are not asked, after that we have no way of seeing or proceeding past the presumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life professionals: that all job is bad work; that all employees are sadly and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only service to bad job is to reduce the workweek and hence split the badness amongst more individuals.
I don’t think anybody can fairly challenge the proposal, in theory, that it is much better “to lower hours instead of lay off employees.” But this increases the likelihood of decreased income and therefore of less “life.” As a treatment for this, Mr. de Graaf can supply only “unemployment benefits,” among the commercial economic situation’s even more breakable “safeguard.”
And what are people going to perform with the “more life” that is understood to be the result of “less job”? Mr. de Graaf says that they “will certainly exercise extra, rest a lot more, yard much more, invest more time with loved ones, and drive less.” This satisfied vision descends from the proposal, prominent not so long ago, that in the spare time gained by the acquisition of “labor-saving tools,” individuals would certainly purchase from collections, galleries, and chamber orchestra.
Yet what happens if the liberated employees drive a lot more
What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, fast food, computer games, tv, electronic “interaction,” and the various genres of porn?
Well, that’ll be “life,” apparently, and anything beats job.
Mr. de Graaf makes the more uncertain assumption that work is a static amount, reliably offered, and divisible into dependably enough sections. This means that a person of the purposes of the commercial economy is to provide work to employees. However, among the objectives of this economic climate has always been to transform independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into staff members, and then to make use of the employees as inexpensively as possible, and after that to change them as soon as possible with technical replacements.
So there could be less functioning hours to split, more workers amongst whom to split them, and less welfare to take up the slack.
On the various other hand, there is a lot of work requiring to be done– community and landmark repair, boosted transport networks, much healthier and more secure food manufacturing, soil conservation, and so on– that nobody yet is willing to spend for. Eventually, such work will have to be done.
We may end up functioning longer workdays in order not to “live,” but to endure.
Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky
Mr. Berry s letter originally showed up in The Progressive (November 2010 in feedback to the write-up “Less Job, More Life.” This write-up initially showed up on Utne