A Generation of Talkers
[Guest post by DRJ]
At A Brief History, Mike K reviews a recent column by Victor Davis Hansen Hanson on how California has changed, and hasn’t changed, in modern times. Both are well worth your time. Dr. Mike concludes by comparing the tools of past generations with the talkers of today:
“When I applied for a surgical residency, only one professor asked me about whether I used tools or played a musical instrument. That was 40 years ago. I have always had tools around and have made them available to my children. One son has gotten into the use of tools and has borrowed many of mine but I don’t mind. He has a family and a house to maintain. The whole culture of tools is important to me. One of Hanson’s commenters said it well:
This passage reminds me of a book I recently read on the Internet Archive : Mind and hand : manual training, the chief factor in education by Charles Ham. Categorized as a vocational text but it is actually promoting the inclusion of manual training as part of the intellectual development of students. The author does a survey from Egypt to 19th century America discussing how as civilizations became separated from manual labor they have declined. I really recommend chapter 2 on the Majesty of Tools. The guy really raises tools to a higher level. But the curious item is, if you ignore that the author mentions nothing after 1899, it could be discussing today’s society.
For if man without tools is nothing, to be unable to use tools is to be destitute of power; and if with tools he is all, to be able to use tools is to be all-powerful. And this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man—this is the last analysis of educational truth.
We are now governed by a generation of talkers. They do nothing but talk and, worse, believe that talk will solve problems, even with enemies. Reading and talking are important as it is the way we learn but there are many things that cannot be accomplished except by getting hands dirty. Sometimes that is a metaphor. I didn’t get my hands dirty in surgery but I often came home drenched in blood or had to shower and wash out my underwear after a big trauma case. Not all of life fits between the pages of a book.”
I join Mike K’s concern. When the SAT added a writing section, some colleges placed significant emphasis on these essays because they made it harder for students to guess. In response, the SAT announced there is no “right” or “wrong” answer for the writing section. In addition, some prep sites encourage students to write for quantity rather than quality.
No wonder we get 17 minute answers to everything.
— DRJ
It’s Victor Davis “Hanson,” not “Hansen.”
[Thanks, Doc. I fixed it. — DRJ]
doc_benway (c4ba77) — 4/12/2010 @ 2:00 pmIn addition to my law practice, I teach as an adjunct at a community college. I’m continually astonished at how often students think that their excuse or “story” will convince me to abandon a class policy and excuse their failure to perform as instructed.
Our elementary education system has also taught our young people that faux “trying” is more important than actually accomplishing or mastering a topic. Showing up is good enough … or for that matter, just partially showing up.
SPQR (26be8b) — 4/12/2010 @ 2:06 pmThere is some irony in this article being cited approvingly on a lawyer’s blog. Just sayin’
(and yeah, I’m a lawyer too)
GreenOnions (29b6cd) — 4/12/2010 @ 2:07 pmMy oldest son is a lawyer and a very good trial lawyer defending construction companies. He isn’t into tools yet although he just got married last summer. But what he does do is competitive sailing nearly every weekend on San Francisco Bay. When he was applying to college, he had to write an essay on some very meaningful thing he had done in his life so far. He asked me about it and I suggested he write about sailing with me to Hawaii when he was 16. We were racing in the Transpac and nearly won (9 minutes from first). He stood watch and took his turns at the tiller in very rough conditions. We had 50 knot squalls at night.
Anyway, he wrote his essay and the counselor told him he had chosen a terrible topic and wondered if he even wanted to go to college. Such is the state of our society.
Mike K (2cf494) — 4/12/2010 @ 2:22 pmMike K., a high school counselor?
They make tits on a boar hog look like the most useful things on earth.
SPQR (26be8b) — 4/12/2010 @ 2:50 pmDentists used to—I don’t know if this is still true—have to show manual dexterity as part of their application process. They would need to mold some items of modeling clay and such.
A good idea!
Eric Blair (c8876d) — 4/12/2010 @ 2:54 pmReminds me of this:
ras (88eebb) — 4/12/2010 @ 3:06 pm#4 Mike K:
Sounds more like he chose a terrible counselor.
#2 SPQR:
Try telling a herd of dairy cows why you are half an hour late.
The just really don’t want to hear it.
EW1(SG) (edc268) — 4/12/2010 @ 3:57 pmI’ve seen people dumbstruck by the accomplishments of manual laborers.
Most people these days can’t dig a hole unless the dirt is very very soft… even then they’ll often opt for the square end shovel instead of the rounded one with the point.
god forbid they are confronted with a pick or a digging bar.
There are elements of the construction industry that are over dependent on mechanization.
I’ve seen guys trying to jackhammer a huge rock the size of two Volkswagon buses that the excavators couldn’t move. They had two backhoes with breakers on them… a chip at a time… we’ve stopped them from wasting their time and split and quarried the rock into useful pieces in no time using a cutoff saw with a diamond blade, a hammer drill, some wedges and a sledge…. and some Mexican guys who knew how to use those tools and also how to read the grain of the rock.
Connection with tools, weapons, soil, food, blood… blood, both from hard labor and from animals rendered into food are being lost.
Steve G (7d4c78) — 4/12/2010 @ 4:25 pmThe only time most American’s see animal blood is on the anti meat propaganda TV shows they run on the planetgreen channel like “Blood, sweat, and take aways”
That is a great show anyway, and I highly recommend it. British kids. Most of them have no clue how to work. They send them off to Thailand, to work in the developing world animal processing industry… comedy and drama ensue… and as a bonus, now I think I know where the fish for off brand fish sticks comes from.
Awesome.
I also recommend “Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts”, if only to see the wits dimmed by entitlement girl who wears her L1500 emerald bracelet to work in a developing world cotton mill… and loses it in a pile of cotton that is bigger than my house.
This is PRECISELY why I love Palin. She’s not from the Ivy-League group of talkers who ramble on and on with big, meaningless sentences. She gets her hands dirty, she says what she needs to say and she tells you exactly what she believes. God, guns, American oil, no illegal immigration, strong defense, less taxes, less government, less abortion.
Metallica (bb58d8) — 4/12/2010 @ 4:30 pmObama is the exact opposite – talks on and on with big flowery sentences that don’t mean a damned thing. Typical Ivy-League pointy-headed Liberal who, as a bonus, is WRONG about everything he talks about.
When I was in grammar school, a Catholic school, we had a field trip to the slaughterhouse of one of the big meat packers. We were about 10 years old and we got to see the cows and pigs hung by one leg on a huge hook, coming into the slaughterhouse on a conveyer and having their throats cut by a guy standing on a platform with a big knife. We went through the whole process with the sisters supervising.
Can anyone imagine a school group doing that today ?
Mike K (2cf494) — 4/12/2010 @ 4:35 pmHa! Machinists rule!
Machinist (9780ec) — 4/12/2010 @ 4:51 pm#12 Machinist:
Once turned a 2 lobe cam with a 2.0mm and 1.4 mm diameter with a center hole 0.8 mm offset. Total length of the piece was 2.0 mm, all on a standard production lathe. Took me twice as long as a real machinist would take.
A house without a mill in the garage just isn’t a home.
EW1(SG) (edc268) — 4/12/2010 @ 5:06 pmAt many shops I did a surprising amount of hand work. Too many machinists, especially CNC machinists, didn’t know how to file, scrape, and lap. My amateur background was very useful. The old timers made many of their hand tools as well. We found we could better suite them to the working conditions.
Machinist (9780ec) — 4/12/2010 @ 5:22 pmEW1(SG),
Machinist (9780ec) — 4/12/2010 @ 5:27 pmWhen we ordered this house we added a three car garage just to have room for a lathe and mill. No machines yet but I still plan to add them.
My own background is that I obtained a computer science undergrad degree, worked for many years in software development and then changed careers to law. So I look like a cerebral type, no doubt.
However, my first part-time job in high school was working in a light assembly plant doing mechanical inspection of the output of the company’s machine shop. I spent some time through my sophomore college year working part-time and summers there, and in mechanical inspection in a castings plant. So I learned some of what it took to actually make something.
SPQR (26be8b) — 4/12/2010 @ 5:34 pmi’m pretty much the only “guy” in my neighborhood: yeah, i hire pros for the big j*bs, but the tee tee stuff is strictly DIY.
redc1c4 (fb8750) — 4/12/2010 @ 5:36 pmi’m also lucky in that HRH likes tools and gadgets at least as much as i do, so we have a garage full of useful things.
When I was growing up, the family across the street was headed by a patent attorney. His hobby was fixing the neighbors’ TV sets.
My father was constantly making or fixing things. The first time I smashed my thumb with a hammer I was about six. I also have some special tools that have associations. I have a hand drill that lost its wooden handle so my grandfather made a new handle from a piece of galvanized pipe. It hangs in my garage with a cross cut saw that was owned by my great-grandfather. You can just barely see the sawyer’s make on the blade. I used to have a rip saw that was in better shape and had a clear sawyer’s make with the year 1868. I made the mistake of telling a contractor friend about it while he was doing some work on my house. His helper stole it.
My sons argue about who will get the dining room set that was my grandparent’s. I had it refinished about 20 years ago and told the refinishers to leave a small screw that fixes one piece of the back of one chair. I watched my grandfather put that screw in it and it is still there.
Mike K (2cf494) — 4/12/2010 @ 5:53 pmI started teaching my daughter about tools when she was 5. By the time she was in third grade she had replaced a bathroom faucet, by fifth grade she knew how to fix a toilet and make a wooden fence gate using a power saw. She has painted more wood and drywall than she can remember; rewired outlets, changed washer hoses, checks her oil, etc. For the past four years she has been the “go to guy” in her college dorm for repairs. My wife has been outfitting her tool trousseau since first grade.
Aside from practical knowledge that will save her plenty of money in her life, she has CONFIDENCE and PATIENCE. Ask anyone what an hour or two under a sink provides in the way of exercising patience! She also knows not everything can be expected to work the first time, so perseverance is a handy trait to have.
She took 12 years of classical art training, played soccer for 13 years, and played stringed instruments for 7 years. And while it make seem like a joke, she actually did make it to Carnegie Hall and played in her school’s symphony orchestra there. The physical and the intellectual have both shaped her personality.
She graduates next month cum laude and we couldn’t be prouder of the young woman she has become.
in_awe (44fed5) — 4/12/2010 @ 6:01 pmToo frickin right! The men and women I know who can’t use tools are the same ones who are pretty much useless everywhere else. They can’t follow simple directions either.
My father has tools everywhere, we were always required to participate in household repairs. My mom’s dad was old school – he had a barn full of tools, including tools he invented for jobs he had around the house and farm. My grandmother had her own smoker and steamer, a washer and dryer set my grandfather reworked for her.
Vivian Louise (643333) — 4/12/2010 @ 6:21 pmOther than painting my place, landscaping the back with my wife and doing some very minor plumbing repairs, I’m not nearly as handy as I’d want to be. OTOH, I’ve also learned the hard way that many DIY jobs wind up costing far more, since you have to hire a professional to undo all the crap you’ve caused in the first place.
Dmac (21311c) — 4/12/2010 @ 6:35 pmAs the resident pointy-headed MSM type, I can at least write about people doing nifty things with tools and materials.
Personally, I have a soldering iron, a Black & Decker power screwdriver, a number of hard drives, CD-ROM drives, several desktop and laptop computers and various other electronica cluttering my pad.
Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (9eb641) — 4/12/2010 @ 7:06 pmGreenOnions:
There’s a lot of truth to what you say. I like to fix things but it probably has more to do with my Dad being an engineer than with me being a lawyer. Growing up, I was always following him around and begging to “help.” Being the great Dad he is, he always showed me how to do things and let me try my hand, and I tried to do the same with my kids.
DRJ (daa62a) — 4/12/2010 @ 7:10 pmDRJ…tried to post this earlier, but the comments page refused to load:
1- Wouldn’t it have been more accurate to say we get 17-minute NON answers?
2- Diplomats talk endlessly solving nothing; large gatherings of men, with suitable tools, resolve seemingly unsolvable geo-political impasses, with great finality!
AD - RtR/OS! (199304) — 4/12/2010 @ 7:16 pmBrother Bradley,
You really need a Dremel tool. Even when I had a full machine shop it got regular use. Very versatile, almost indispensable.
Machinist (9780ec) — 4/12/2010 @ 7:22 pmThanks, Machinist.
From Wikipedia, it appears that the Dremel is a Swiss Army knife of machine tools.
By inserting an appropriate bit (or burr) the tool can perform drilling, grinding, sharpening, cutting, cleaning, polishing, sanding, routing, carving and engraving. Both battery-powered and corded models are available. Dremel options include a miniature planer attachment and a saber saw attachment that lets the tool act much like a small reciprocating saw.
Brother Bradley J. Fikes, C.O.R. (9eb641) — 4/12/2010 @ 7:26 pm[…] original here: A Generation of Talkers […]
A Generation of Talkers | Liberal Whoppers (d16888) — 4/12/2010 @ 7:33 pmWith diamond burrs we used them to carve carbide tools for the lathes and mills. They were useful for deburring in internal areas, you could cut drills and pins, you can cut slots that would be hard to mill. Endless uses.
Around the house they do many things. Once you have one you will not want to be without. You don’t need a lot of accessories. A few types of bits do many, many jobs.
Machinist (9780ec) — 4/12/2010 @ 7:34 pmThe author does a survey from Egypt to 19th century America discussing how as civilizations became separated from manual labor they have declined.
I can kind of accept that theory—certainly in terms of modern Western societies becoming too effete, self-indulgent, and definitely too politically foppish. But I also observe Third World countries where the average person isn’t sitting around in front of the TV on a typical day eating bon-bons. Where many people are involved in some type of manual labor, ekeing out a hand-to-mouth existence. And yet such societies remain mostly broken down and moribund, year after year, decade after decade.
As for tools, I’d feel lost without their always being readily available. They’re kind of like a security blanket. Certainly when things break down, such as plumbing, a refrigerator, a car, and my always wanting to first see if I can tinker around — and hopefully find a solution — before hiring an expert.
Mark (411533) — 4/12/2010 @ 9:45 pmDmac:
We learned that lesson at our house, too. (By the way, it’s really true that Roto-Rooter makes “away go troubles down the drain.”) But I think you have to have some knowledge of how to fix things to know who to call, when to call, and to decide whether they did a good job.
DRJ (daa62a) — 4/12/2010 @ 10:32 pmAD #24:
Sorry about the comments problem. (Keep the faith, though. Things may get better very soon.) And that probably was a 17-minute non-answer.
DRJ (daa62a) — 4/12/2010 @ 10:34 pm