The Death of Shop Class?

ATKeiper writes: "A major essay in the latest issue of the journal The New Atlantis (which I help edit) describes the decline of manual competence — the ability to build and fix things with our own hands — in the age of prefabricated parts and hidden workings. The author, Matthew B. Crawford, writes that schools nowadays are wrong to steer young people away from the manual trades and toward 'the most ghostly kinds of work.' Manual work, he argues, is more cognitively demanding and personally fulfilling than many people would expect. Meanwhile, white-collar 'knowledge worker' jobs — the jobs that put us in front of computers all day — seem to be heading more and more toward routinized mindlessness."