If this were a video or radio show I would start with clips from this 1960s movie on the American Maker. Since I’m a blogger, I’ll just highly encourage you to watch the first 90 seconds of this video before continuing on to the rest of the post.
I start with this romantic view of an era of American industry because today I want to harken back to a time where Americans were defined by our ability to produce quality products with both beauty and function. “Of all the things Americans are, we are makers,” the film tells us in its opening. When I think of the American Makers, I think of my grandparents and their siblings who live in rural Ohio. Each one of them has a hobby, from making wooden toys to beautiful fountain pens, to quilting, to making jams and pies. Everything exchanged between them on Christmas are things they have made by hand. It’s a culture of making very emblematic of this video, and a culture that has unfortunately largely died out.
“We no longer celebrate the way things get made. We are more interested in the way things get bought,” Mike Rowe wrote in his piece in Fast Company on how to jump start the American auto industry. You might recognize Rowe’s name from Dirty Jobs. As the host, he tours America, apprenticing in strange, messy, and hard jobs alongside the people who work them (hear stories of his work in his TED Talk below). As a result of his work on Dirty Jobs he realized there was a massive problem in America: hard work, craftsmanship, and making were becoming devalued, despite the important role they played in making our lives possible.
It reminded him of a poster he saw in his high school’s counselor’s office. “In the long history of bad advice, you’d have look pretty hard to find something dumber than Work Smart Not Hard,” he said in a film about him remaking the poster that advocated going to college to ensure you didn’t end up doing manual labor. Rowe instead advocates the we have to work smart and hard. The four year degree is considered almost a prerequisite to entering the middle class job market while skilled labor and technical know-how is no longer brought up as an option to most “bright” students. Mike Rowe would like to change that.
“Consider the reality of today’s job market,” Rowe wrote on the website for his mikeroweWORKS Foundation, dedicated to providing resources and scholarships for those getting into trade work: “We have a massive skills gap. Even with record unemployment, millions of skilled jobs are unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them. Meanwhile, unemployment among college graduates is at an all-time high, and the majority of those graduates with jobs are not even working in their field of study. Plus, they owe a trillion dollars in student loans. A trillion! And still, we push a four-year college degree as the best way for the most people to find a successful career?”
There continues to be a class divide between thinkers, those destined for office jobs, and makers, those destined for trade jobs. You can see the beginnings of the maker/thinker class divide in education. Students who excel in classes take advance placement courses where they learn Sophocles or calculus while those not doing well in the classroom are sent to alternative schools where they learn to work on cars or run a print shop. “Smart” kids go to college and sit in offices, the rest resort to manual labor. Yet, I believe most successful people need both kinds of education. There is incredible value in learning another language, understanding Shakespeare, and knowing stoichiometry. There is also incredible value in learning how to build a robot, repair a car, and sew a shirt. We need our students to be thinkers and makers. There is opportunity in both.
While our parents sought to get away from manual labor, you do see more people in my generation desiring to go back to jobs that get them outside the cubicle. More and more college educated students are going to the farms after graduation to intern. “It’s almost like a third education after college,” one younger man interviewed in a Huffington Post article said of his internship on an organic farm. I was personally one of those people who interned on a farm one summer while I was in college and while there is a lot to learn in the classroom, there is just as much to be learned digging in the dirt. In fact most people I know who became farmers are far happier then those who went on to office work.
The growth of the Maker Faires and hackerspaces in America does give me some hope for the resurgence of the American maker. We are seeing now a resurgence of maker communities and people who want to tinker, build, and create, not just consume. New robotics and lego build programs in schools give students the opportunities to be makers in schools. Places like Pinterest are popping up with thousands of ideas for Do It Yourself fixes and crafts. Etsy, now makes it easier than ever before to create and buy hand made wares. There is new opportunity for Americans to once again make things.
Perhaps it is too idealistic to think that Pinterest, hackerspaces, and youth robotics teams could spell a new era for American industry. What they do let us do is tap into a part of our history, our culture, that we nearly allowed to be forgotten. “We’ve become profoundly disconnected from a critical part of our workforce. The skilled part. The part that keeps the lights on,” Mike Rowe wrote on his website. It’s time to once again celebrate the American Maker.
