SOCIOLOGY: The Craftsman By Richard Sennett, Penguin/Allen Lane, 326pp. £25The never-ending process of understanding is infinitely more important than quantifying the time spent teaching and learning, writes Andreas Hess.
AS YET another UK higher education audit hit the university corridors, Richard Sennett, world-famous and much-published professor of sociology at both the London School of Economics and New York University, had to fill out a form to explain how many hours per week he had allocated to serious research activity. Unlike his academic colleagues who dutifully obliged by putting down an estimate that made them look hard-working, Sennett interpreted the task differently by revealing that a considerable amount of his research time was actually spent sitting in his armchair and thinking.
In the brave new world of higher education, shadowed and assessed by an entire army of half-educated "suits" trying to put a price on everything and nothing, from individual academics' working hours to the departmental use of toilet paper, Sennett's reply was a lonely voice of reason. For Sennett, being a professor of sociology was a calling; his vocation involved craftsmanship, not commodities produced in a knowledge factory and "measured" by input-output data.
HUMAN BEINGS GIVE meaning to their actions and lives and this includes their education. For some it is only the final certificate that matters; to others it is the never-ending process of understanding and the life of the mind that are important, the final certificate being almost a by-product. What, people now say , is a poem or an essay worth? Economically speaking, probably not a lot; yet, a poem or an essay can enrich and sometimes even save people's lives. The proper transmission of such classic knowledge is priceless, yet the organised destruction of craftsmanship through mindless bureaucrats and vote-dependent politicians continues on a scale never seen before in western countries, including Ireland.
To be a good educator and a good citizen in the republic of knowledge, to foster, to acknowledge and respect self-worth, to encourage the striving for autonomy - these are ideals that Sennett has often referred to in his previous work. Yet, until the appearance of The Craftsman he has never spelled out completely what it meant to get it right and what it meant to take pride in one's own work and in the learning process that accompanies such activity. In his fascinating trilogy, The Corrosion of Character (1998), Respect (2003) and The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006), Sennett spoke about success and failure and how various individuals cope with each. He didn't really discuss the ideals behind his work or how to deal with creativity, individual imagination, and the repair work that the craftsman often needs to do.
In his new book, it is successful learning, or to be more precise, a certain way of apprenticeship, that Sennett tackles. What Sennett is after is the proper definition of means and ends, and the right balance between the two. Sennett acknowledges immediately that playing around with Pandora's box - the fact that we are confronted constantly with what we have created - leads to ambivalences and even to disastrous results. As the negative example of Oppenheimer's deadly toy illustrates, critical self-awareness, a good central idea and the careful mastering and handling of the means are crucial to the craftsman, artist, scientist or writer. Matter matters, it modifies our work and makes us constantly look out for improvement, sometimes alternative solutions and occasionally repair. This is what distinguishes good craftsmanship from other activities.
Sennett who quite rightly objects to quantification by "suits" believes that a good apprenticeship requests at least 10,000 hours if you wish to be a craftsman. This amounts to a few years, sometimes even a lifetime. In terms of anthropology, he argues, we have been well prepared by nature for such a task; walking upright has liberated both hands and mind. Sennett evokes a number of examples of craftsmanship from past and present to make his case: how to work with the right bricks and tiles, how to produce beautiful glass, how to play an instrument well, how to be an enlightening educator, author or architect, or how to employ organisational skills for designing intelligent computer programmes and groundbreaking mobile phone technology.
DIFFERENT CHALLENGES ARE given by different materials in each of these crafts. Yet what all the examples have in common is that while working with the material, human beings also learn about themselves. Thus, good craftsmanship is not only a rejection of the merely instrumental relationship between means and ends but actually enriches and makes us understand our own lives.
The argument of The Craftsman is firmly rooted in the sociological and philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism. Sennett is interested in linking ideas to lived experiences, just like the philosopher John Dewey was in his discussion of the relationship between democracy and education, the maverick economist Thorstein Veblen in his defence of the instinct of workmanship and the Texan radical C Wright Mills in his well-known conceptionalisation of the sociological imagination. Like his predecessors, Sennett is not interested in building systems and he has never favoured theory for its own sake. In contrast to continental European thinkers the American Pragmatist tradition demands concrete answers to concrete questions. Richard Sennett has contributed another important chapter on how this may be achieved.
Andreas Hess teaches sociology at University College Dublin