There’s knowledge work and there’s manual work, and the idea that these are two very different things seemed very bogus to me. I needed to make the case for how much thinking goes on in the trades. And that this can be a life worth choosing—if you’re someone who likes to use your brain at work. And once you get into that, it becomes a very interesting question of psychology: how using your hands and using your mind are connected. Another thing that prompted the book is the year that I spent teaching high school Latin, which I was barely qualified to do. There’s some simile here to be made with fools rushing in. At any rate, the kids were being told that they had to take this course to get their SAT scores up—because everyone has to get into college. The class was something of a disaster: Half of them were jacked up on Ritalin just trying to stay awake. I felt like if I had been able to take some of these kids aside and say, “Hey, let’s build a deck,” or, “Let’s overhaul an engine,” they would have perked right up.
How effectively does this essay serve as a response to the situation Crawford describes in the interview?