In 1962, the day after Labor Day, I got on a school bus, for almost the first time, with my best long time elementary school friends to travel 6 miles north to a brand spanking new junior high/high school — the brain child of five adjoining rural Vermont towns that combined to create this new “union” school.
In the first week I remember wondering naively why I only saw Alan, my next door neighbor with whom I played endless hours with different balls, rode bikes through the woods and fields, walked to and from school…why I only saw Alan on the bus. I learned, because he told me, that he was in a different group in English, math, and social studies in the morning, and in the afternoon, for the whole 3 hours, he went down the back stairs to the lowest level of the building to a trade shop equipped with all the latest machinery for woodworking, auto mechanics, plumbing, and electrical trades. I went down there once with him. He showed me around. That night at dinner I asked my mom and dad, “Hey, how come I can’t go with Alan in the afternoon down to the shop? It’s fantastic!” I don’t remember their answer, exactly, but I do remember it didn’t make sense to me.
At the same time I wondered why Betty—who had won every Friday-at-the-blackboard math competition from first to sixth grade (at the end of the dictation of 9 plus numbers in a column addition, she’d just write the answer)—why was Betty not in my Algebra class? And why was Gloria—who could catch and throw as well as our star, Bobby, hit as well as most of the boys, and certainly run faster than all of us—why couldn’t Gloria play baseball with us?
A contemporary of mine, Mike Rose, spent a career in education researching variations of these same questions. Mike Rose was a research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He authored several books, including The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, and more recently Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.. He died on August 15, 2022, at age 77, after a short illness. One of the last subjects Mike was pondering and writing about was “Public School and the Social Fabric.” An essay he wrote of that title was published in 2022.
I was introduced to Rose in an “On Being” podcast hosted by Krista Tippet.
https://onbeing.org/programs/mike-rose-the-deepest-meanings-of-intelligence-and-vocation/#transcript
Mike Rose once wrote this: I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.
Krista Tippet wrote of Rose: …the particular way he saw the world resonates more than ever before, as our debates about standardized testing, the information economy, and the future of school only intensify. He argued with care and eloquence that we risk too narrow a view of the way the physical, the human, and the cognitive blend in all kinds of learning and in all kinds of labor. His insights…offer much to enlarge our civic imagination on big subjects that are newly alive about the heart of who we are, including class dynamics we still scarcely know how to speak about in U.S. culture, and the deepest meanings of intelligence and of vocation.
In the interview, to embody our cultural bias, Rose recounted a rejoinder from a friend of his who said: You know, it took a guy with a college degree to screw this up and a guy with a high school degree to fix it.
Rose elaborated as follows: [It’s a case of] hands-on experience versus the abstractions that can so often emerge from just learning through books. …what I strive for in my own work and with students who I’ve worked for, I strive to try and figure out how you blend these strands, because again, I’m very uncomfortable with binaries, with simple dichotomies, with, it’s either this or it’s that.
And in fact, I think what happens in most kinds of good work, whether it’s styling hair or neurosurgery, is that you get this blend of formal training with hands-on experience. And the folks who best blend those strands are the people who are usually the best at what they do.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been in the middle of a design/build project. We’re renovating a double set of stairs of a 100+ year old dairy barn from the basement to the second floor, up two flights. My brother, Mike, the just retired chair of the Ohio State University Department of Architecture, our veteran carpenter friend, Will, and I, spent hours between Mike’s drawings, Will’s critiques, and my wondering and measuring. Mike and I are a combo of book learning and many experiences in the field building homes and other structures. With Will’s experience and acumen for calculating and solving the unique problems in fitting a “state code stairway” into an ancient barn, the three of us, as Rose would say, blended our hands on skills and intelligences. Will built a sturdy (you could take a cow up those stairs, Mike mused) and elegant, rustic style set of stairs. They fit the space and barn perfectly.
