Customer Reviews

The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book forces you to look at things in a new light. When you hire someone to do some work around the house, cut your hair, or bring food to you in a restaurant; you really don't want someone that's too dumb. Otherwise you house, your hair, or your food isn't right. But we have been conditioned to think that these kinds of workers do not need any brainpower.

In this book, Mike Rose, a member of the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies grew up in a working class family and witnessed first hand the skills it takes to do the manual work about which he writes.

With that a basis, he begins to look at intelligence in a new, broader sense. Perhaps our traditional IQ tests are wrong. And if we think of these workers, these people as being not too bright, then we shut down opportunities for advancement and it makes you think seriously about how people will vote in the upcoming presidential election.

This is a seminal book. It establishes several points, but it is just a first step. How should we change education to be more meaningful to people who are just as smart but not oriented the same way. Are the traditional three R's simply not applicable? If not, what should we do? We don't want to condemn people who are just slow starters on the traditional path, yet we want to provide the best education possible for all.

We read The Mind at Work in Comp 201 at SUNY Potsdam. Here are some informal comments from students in the class:

--He does belabor his main point
--It is an eye opener
--It changes the way you think about the working class
--Rose backs up his work by using documented research and real experiences from real people.
--Dr. Springsteen did not appreciate the citation style
--We gave it 3.5 stars as a class average
--It could be useful for high school students who have to choose between academic and vocational tracks
--Rose's writing style was kind of boring, but easy to understand. He wrote in a person-to-person style, like you were talking to him.
--Some of the writing was too technical (but maybe that's because I am a creative writer)
--wouldn't recommend to an average person...it's like an acquired taste, you really have to be interested in learning about society and the ideas instilled in us by society
--it reads like a textbook until the 7th chapter when you get to hear his argument
--with the section on vocational education, he tied in younger generations; interesting generational approach

This book forces you to look at things in a new light. When you hire someone to do some work around the house, cut your hair, or bring food to you in a restaurant; you really don't want someone that's too dumb. Otherwise you house, your hair, or your food isn't right. But we have been conditioned to think that these kinds of workers do not need any brainpower.

In this book, Mike Rose, a member of the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies grew up in a working class family and witnessed first hand the skills it takes to do the manual work about which he writes.

With that a basis, he begins to look at intelligence in a new, broader sense. Perhaps our traditional IQ tests are wrong. And if we think of these workers, these people as being not too bright, then we shut down opportunities for advancement and it makes you think seriously about how people will vote in the upcoming presidential election.

This is a seminal book. It establishes several points, but it is just a first step. How should we change education to be more meaningful to people who are just as smart but not oriented the same way. Are the traditional three R's simply not applicable? If not, what should we do? We don't want to condemn people who are just slow starters on the traditional path, yet we want to provide the best education possible for all.

Mike Rose is a kind of mix between Studs Terkel and Antonio Damasio, the guy who wrote Descartes' Error. In this book he documents the intelligence it takes to do blue-collar and service industry jobs like being a waitress or a hairstylist or a plumber or a welder. While he does this he also pays tribute to his own family, all of whom worked in manufacturing or the service industry. I found the chapter on his mother, a career waitress, especially moving and beautifully written. Rose dispels the notion that blue collar or service industry labor is "mindless" as he provides an inspiring and personal account of the lives of workers -- from the shop floor to the diner to the beauty salon. His discussion of education is wonderful. Rose provides a vision for moving beyond the "skill and drill" approach to education usually doled out to the sons and daughters of the working classes. A terrific read from a writer with deep, first hand knowledge of the lives of America's workers.

Mike Rose is a just a plain wonderful writer. He knows how to really evoke a scene, and bring his ideas to life thorugh the stories he tells. In this book Rose explore the idea that much of what we call blue collar and other manual labor can entail high levels of intelligence. In this he is attempting to blur what has traditionally been seen as the hand/brain divide in occupations and study. He engages in this exploration by interviewing and observing people engaged in a variety of trades, from hairdresser and waitress to plumber and welder. He also explore what this might say about our traditional school curriculum and specifically vocational curriculum. A very thoughtful and delightful book.

Mike Rose shows us that smart people are everywhere and that a college education does not confer "smart" on people. His examples of working folks highlight their abilities to problem solve, multitask, learn on the spot, and communicate effectively. Employers need to read this book and realize that requiring a college degree for many positions shuts out many qualifeid applicants. I wish more hiring directors would read this book!

Attempts to evaluate and measure the quality of human effort, or what economists now call human capital, have a long history. Leviticus (XXVI: 3-6) says,

"When a man shall clearly utter a vow of persons unto the Lord according to thy valuation, then thy valuation shall be for the male from twenty years old even onto sixty years even, even thy valuation shall be fifty shekels of silver .... In addition, if it be a female, then thy valuation shall be thirty shekels. And if it be from five years old even unto twenty years old, then thy valuation shall be for male twenty shekels and for the female ten shekels."

I am quoting this biblical passage from Elchanan Cohn's classic text The Economics of Education (1979), to point out that the idea of human capital is historical. More recently, emphasis has shifted towards contrasting "hand work" to "brain work" in a way that attributes higher value to the latter than the former. This book is the first ever study of its kind to raise serious questions about that attribution. It documents "the thought it takes to do physical work." It debugs the notion that physical work does not have intelligent effort behind it by telling stories of hard working communities. The general notion that hand work is dumb work comes from a disturbing fact that "in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but not thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain" (p. xv).

Chapter 7 on "Rethinking Hand and Brain" is the gem - to me. However, all eight chapters are just as good. For the specialist the afterword "On Method", and 21 pages of notes (pp.229-249) are good sources of inspiration. "On Method" describes extant methodological approaches to "the nature of cognition and legitimacy of various methods of studying it" (p.217). As for me the author has made a compelling case that it is silly to continue to argue that physical work is not intelligent work. Obviously, when the smartest construction engineer picks up a wrench to check if that last bolt on the bridge is tight enough, he or she does not turn off his/her brain. An EXCELLENT TRIBUTE to both labor and human intelligence!

Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
ISBN: 1600210465

that completely changes your life. This is one of those books. Writing from the heart, Rose probes our society's categorizations of work and the intellect it takes to do all kinds of work. It is deep, powerful and thought-provoking.

In the interest of full disclosure, the author quoted a sentence from my first book's introduction, so of course I'm going to smile when I read The Mind at Work.

Pirsig's book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has a brief chapter about the genius of welding, a glimpse at how to do it with purity and art, without ego or excessive pride. Competence is its own reward. That's the sense I get from this book. The working class contains some real geniuses, who are not scholars in the traditional sense. Even so, they study. Real, real hard.

The intelligence of the average American working person is undervalued, because it's unseen. Good. It can continue to flourish in secret, exploited by its owners alone.

The book is OK. The central theme is that we judge people and their abilities (intelligence) based on the job they hold, and that in dismissing the job as unimportant we also dismiss the individual as unimportant. The thesis is important, but the book belabors the point and spends too much time covering points that otherwise could have been stipulated. The greatest problem with the book is the notes style that is used. It is worthless. The latest trend in publishing is to pull a phrase from the text, highlight it under a notes section at the end of the book, and then present a collection of endnote and bibliographic information. Not only is this format cluttered and unhelpful, but the pull quote is not numerically referenced within the text. This lack of direct reference makes the notes utterly useless. This format is lazy and intellectually dishonest, and the practice needs to be discontinued.