Fences and the Idea of ‘Work’ Literature & Language Essay

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December 12, 2019
Fences and the Idea of ‘Work’
Education has always been seen by society as the path to success. Thus, a student’s performance while he is still studying is deemed to be an accurate predictor of their success in life. While time has proven that success happens due to the combination of different external and internal forces, most people still believe in the misconception that “high grades would always mean success”. This misconception also extends between different kinds of careers. On the one hand, people believe that the more ‘complex’ or ‘academic’ your work is, the more important and crucial it is to the functioning of the world. On the other hand, society also believes that people who do the “dirty” work are less interesting, complex, and therefore must be paid less. In this article, these misconceptions regarding how we define “work” would be discussed in greater detail. We would see that the reason for these distinctions that we make emanates from external socio-economic forces that favor the alienation of people as well as the differentiation (or ‘fencing’) of different societal sectors into groups that exclude one another. In order to provide this analysis, the author would utilize both Crawford’s ‘The Case for Working with your Hand’ and Klein’s ‘Fences of Enclosure: Windows of Opportunity’. All in all, the author believes that education (being the shaper of people’s minds) should be tailor-fitted to each individual skills of the students and encourage them to find a job that fits their own skills and capacities.
Traditional educational system has always focused on shaping people based on a single standard. As could be gleaned from both reality and the article written by Crawford, it could be seen that the current traditional system focuses on the creation of ‘docile bodies’ that would fit with the capitalist system. As he aptly discussed, students have always been thought to be ‘useful’ to society, and in turn, this usefulness has always been our subject of praise in our daily lives. In order to do this, however, the system must make sure that the citizen would not resort to mechanisms that are contrary to what should be done. Thus, the system ensures that citizens follow the rules and the norms accordingly by molding them in line with the design of the capitalist system, where they work in very specific jobs (i.e., photocopying documents) regardless of their own personal interests. In turn, this results in “the experience of the individual agency to be elusive… as the chain of cause and effect becomes opaque and responsibility diffuse” CITATION Cra09 \l 1033 (Crawford).
Aside from using a uniform system of teaching and measurement to shape individuals, the current educational system that we have also created both real and imagined differences between different types of jobs. For example, we believe that since white-collar jobs require greater use of one’s intellect and brain, which is similar to the measure we employed at the academe, then these jobs are more complex and crucial for society’s existence. In contrast, we also believed that the heavy dependence on the use of manual labor by blue-collar workers makes such jobs significantly less prestigious, especially when considering that our educational system has shaped us in such a way where manual work is only ‘extracurriculars’ rather than an integral part of the curriculum.
Klein discussed the idea of fences as sybmolic barriers that creates a rift between individuals or sectors of the society. As discussed earlier, our current educational system has shaped us into categorizing manual labor from intellectual labor and create the notion that the latter is always and will always be more important than the latter. As we grow up and graduate from the academe, a variety of social, economic, and political factors reinforces this notion among ourselves by building a fence from which we view ourselves.
Socio-politically speaking, for example, the categorization between manual and intellectual work is reinforced as people who tend to deviate from the “right path” (specifically getting a diploma) are viewed with hostility and receives less opportunity than those who were able to follow accordingly. As aptly stated by Klein, “a gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive”. Furthermore, the trend towards overspecialization (i.e., Masters and PhDs) has added to the notion that the more educational credentials you have, the better your performance is compared to those who don’t. Thus, because of how society views ‘deviants’ and sanctions them by giving them fewer opportunities, rethinking about these “fences” that we have becomes even more difficult.
On a more personal (psychological) level, we would see from the previous discussions that external factors such as socio-politics and education are the greatest reasons why rethinking these fences becomes difficult. Specifically, as we are shaped towards the appreciation of success relative to what the ...