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<\/figure>\nby Terry Heick<\/strong><\/p>\n The influence of Berry on my life\u2013and thus inseparably from my teaching and learning\u2013has been immeasurable. His ideas on scale, limits, accountability, community, and careful thinking have a place in larger conversations about economy, culture, and vocation, if not politics, religion, and anyplace else where common sense fails to linger.<\/p>\n But what about education?<\/p>\n Below is a letter Berry wrote in response to a call for a \u2018shorter workweek.\u2019 I\u2019ll leave the argument up to him, but it has me wondering if this kind of thinking may have a place in new learning forms.<\/p>\n When we insist, in education, to pursue \u2018obviously good\u2019 things, what are we missing?<\/p>\n That is, as adherence to outcomes-based learning practices with tight alignment between standards, learning targets, and assessments, with careful scripting horizontally and vertically, no \u2018gaps\u2019\u2013what assumption is embedded in this insistence? Because in the high-stakes game of public education, each of us collectively is \u2018all in.\u2019<\/p>\n And more immediately, are we preparing learners for \u2018good work,\u2019 or merely academic fluency? Which is the role of public education?<\/p>\n If we tended towards the former, what evidence would we see in our classrooms and universities?<\/p>\n And maybe most importantly, are they mutually exclusive?<\/p>\n Wendell Berry on \u2018Good Work\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n The Progressive<\/em>, in the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild\u2019s \u201cEditor\u2019s Note\u201d and in the article by John de Graaf (\u201cLess Work, More Life\u201d), offers \u201cless work\u201d and a 30-hour workweek as needs that are as indisputable as the need to eat.<\/p>\n Though I would support the idea of a 30-hour workweek in some circumstances, I see nothing absolute or indisputable about it. It can be proposed as a universal need only after abandonment of any respect for vocation and the replacement of discourse by slogans.<\/p>\n It is true that the industrialization of virtually all forms of production and service has filled the world with \u201cjobs\u201d that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring\u2014as well as inherently destructive. I don\u2019t think there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I wish for its elimination, but even its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, let alone advocated, by the \u201cleft\u201d or the \u201cright.\u201d Neither side, so far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. To shorten the \u201cofficial workweek\u201d while consenting to the continuation of bad work is not much of a solution.<\/p>\n The old and honorable idea of \u201cvocation\u201d is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.<\/p>\n Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as \u201cless work, more life\u201d or \u201cwork-life balance,\u201d as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.<\/p>\n But aren\u2019t we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?<\/p>\n And isn\u2019t that exactly why we object (when we do object) to bad work?<\/p>\n And if you are called to music or farming or carpentry or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your skills well and to a good purpose and therefore are happy or satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do less of it?<\/p>\n More important, why should you think of your life as distinct from it?<\/p>\n And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do less of it?<\/p>\n A useful discourse on the subject of work would raise a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:<\/p>\n What work are we talking about?<\/p>\n Did you choose your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?<\/p>\n How much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill, and your pride is employed in your work?<\/p>\n Do you respect the product or the service that is the result of your work?<\/p>\n For whom do you work: a manager, a boss, or yourself?<\/p>\n What are the ecological and social costs of your work?<\/p>\n If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think anybody can honorably object to the proposition, in theory, that it is better \u201cto reduce hours rather than lay off workers.\u201d But this raises the likelihood of reduced income and therefore of less \u201clife.\u201d As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can offer only \u201cunemployment benefits,\u201d one of the industrial economy\u2019s more fragile \u201csafety nets.\u201d<\/p>\n And what are people going to do with the \u201cmore life\u201d that is understood to be the result of \u201cless work\u201d? Mr. de Graaf says that they \u201cwill exercise more, sleep more, garden more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive less.\u201d This happy vision descends from the proposition, popular not so long ago, that in the spare time gained by the purchase of \u201clabor-saving devices,\u201d people would patronize libraries, museums, and symphony orchestras.<\/p>\n But what if the liberated workers drive\u00a0more<\/em>?<\/p>\n What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, fast food, computer games, television, electronic \u201ccommunication,\u201d and the various genres of pornography?<\/p>\n Well, that\u2019ll be \u201clife,\u201d supposedly, and anything beats work.<\/p>\n Mr. de Graaf makes the further doubtful assumption that work is a static quantity, dependably available, and divisible into dependably sufficient portions. This supposes that one of the purposes of the industrial economy is to provide employment to workers. On the contrary, one of the purposes of this economy has always been to transform independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into employees, and then to use the employees as cheaply as possible, and then to replace them as soon as possible with technological substitutes.<\/p>\n So there could be fewer working hours to divide, more workers among whom to divide them, and fewer unemployment benefits to take up the slack.<\/p>\n On the other hand, there is a lot of work needing to be done\u2014ecosystem and watershed restoration, improved transportation networks, healthier and safer food production, soil conservation, etc.\u2014that nobody yet is willing to pay for. Sooner or later, such work will have to be done.<\/p>\n We may end up working longer workdays in order not to \u201clive,\u201d but to survive.<\/p>\n Wendell Berry Mr. Berry\u2019<\/em>s letter\u00a0originally appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The Progressive<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>(November 2010)\u00a0<\/em>in\u00a0response to\u00a0the article\u00a0<\/em>\u201cLess Work, More Life.\u201d This article originally appeared on Utne<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Port Royal, Kentucky<\/p>\n