Episode 73:
Originally Broadcast: November 9, 2014.
Recorded: November 4, 2014
Mike Rose’s mother was a waitress. She worked for years negotiating the complex world of planning around, strategizing about, delivering to, and socializing with customers. She had to master timing, memory, efficiency, and psychology, but if you asked just about anyone, they would have said her work involved no deep thought at all. In his important book The Mind at Work, Mike challenges the idea that waitressing is thoughtless, while also looking at the complex intellect of hairdressers, electricians, carpenters, and others in similar professions. This episode of Why? asks us to relearn everything we claim to know about manual laborers and reexamine our assumptions about the role of thinking in jobs.
The son of Italian immigrants, Mike Rose was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and raised in Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of Loyola University (B.A.), the University of Southern California (M.S.), and the University of California, Los Angeles (M.A. and Ph.D.). Over the last forty years, he has taught in a range of educational settings, from kindergarten to job training and adult literacy programs. He is currently on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
He is the author of eleven books including Lives on the Boundary: the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, and Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.
His website can be found here.
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[…] training, nor am I suggesting that it is lesser than other forms. As Mike Rose and I discussed in the last episode of Why? Radio, and as I mention in an earlier post, vocational education can be rich, deep, complex, and […]
[…] training, nor am I suggesting that it is lesser than other forms. As Mike Rose and I discussed in the last episode of Why? Radio, and as I mention in an earlier post, vocational education can be rich, deep, complex, and […]
[…] This is the monologue for the latest episode of Why? Radio. The topic was “The Intelligence in Everyday Work.” You can listen the whole episode online here. […]