box and rock

The following is the abstract of an article for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review by Professor and legal scholar Ali Khan: 

"The denigration of manual labor is a long, sad, captivating story of human civilization. No community can survive, let alone prosper, without the manual labor of farmers, industrial employees, construction workers, miners, and innumerable other men and women who toil to make everyone's day-to-day life possible. Yet a deeply entrenched prejudice against manual labor persists. Cultures and communities across the globe and throughout history have interwoven complex social, religious, and legal webs to create, maintain, and perpetuate a manual class that performs menial, difficult, and hazardous work. Weavers of these webs, including intellectual, political, and legal elites, personally benefit from the fruits of labor. These elites, however, also undervalue manual labor, nurturing a prejudice often made manifest in visible social realities. It is no mere coincidence that the manual class, providing socially indispensable physical labor, frequently ends up deprived of income, status, social respect, and even human dignity."

The full text of the article from 2001, The  Dignity of Manual Labor, can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=936890 

If colleges and universities want to become more diverse, I suggest they create greater opportunities for their students to become more deeply engaged in doing real things with their hands. Some would demonstrate  skills that others may not have bothered to have. All would gain a deeper respect for the dignity of labor.

In my shop I have a box to show. It illustrates a more formal approach to design with all parts being made of the same wood. The other photo (to put things in perspective) shows a large piece of chert unearthed by my box blade while at work on our road. The fracturing on the surface resembles tree bark. It is from the Ordovician Period that started 484 million years ago, before there were trees on the planet. The first trees came in the Middle Devonian period, only 75 million years later. So what looks like bark is not.

Make, fix and create...