Submission + - The Nation is Losing its Toolbox 2
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Louis Uchitelle writes that in Aisle 34 of Home Depot is precut vinyl flooring, the glue already in place, in Aisle 26 are prefab windows, and if you don’t want to be your own handyman, head to Aisle 23 or Aisle 35, where a help desk will arrange for an installer as mastering tools and working with one’s hands recede as American cultural values. "At a time when the American factory seems to be a shrinking presence, and when good manufacturing jobs have vanished, perhaps never to return, there is something deeply troubling about this dilution of American craftsmanship," writes Uchitelle. "Craftsmanship is, if not a birthright, then a vital ingredient of the American self-image as a can-do, inventive, we-can-make-anything people." Mass layoffs and plant closings have drawn plenty of headlines and public debate over the years, and they still occasionally do. But the damage to skill and craftsmanship — what’s needed to build a complex airliner or a tractor, or for a worker to move up from assembler to machinist to supervisor — has gone largely unnoticed. “In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on,” says Michael Hout. “People who work with their hands are doing things today that we call service jobs, in restaurants and laundries, or in medical technology and the like.” The damage to American craftsmanship seems to parallel the precipitous slide in manufacturing employment. and manufacturing’s shrinking presence helps explain the decline in craftsmanship, if only because many of the nation’s assembly line workers were skilled in craft work. “Young people grow up without developing the skills to fix things around the house,” says Richard T. Curtin. “They know about computers, of course, but they don’t know how to build them.”"
