The value of working with your hands

(external link) Stephen Colbert interviews Matthew Crawford. Crawford, a philosopher and a mechanic, holds a PHD in political philosophy and recently wrote a book titled Shop class as soulcraft.

Along similar lines, I shared an article with my wife earlier in the week titled The Manly Art of Knitting. From that post:

My wife, LeAnna and I have been thinking a lot lately about work. We’ve been wondering if perhaps we’ve been mis-educated to believe that avoidance of manual labor is the pinnacle of education and evolution — that to prove that we’ve arrived in the world, we should work with our heads and not our hands. What we’re wondering is whether that system has steered us wrong, disconnecting us not even so much from our heritage, but from some essential part of who we are as people. That as people, we were made to create. That on some level people were meant to work for their food. And that, similarly, part of our care not just for ourselves but for each other involves a physical act of creating.

Of course we were made to create! “In the beginning, God created . . . so God created man in His own image . . . “