Learning with Your Hands

A Q&A with Matthew Crawford — philosopher (PhD, Chicago), motorcycle-shop owner, and author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and the 2015 book The World Beyond Your Head — about why skilled manual practices (short-order cooking, hockey, organ-making, motorcycle repair) provide what Crawford calls "ecologies of attention." Such practices pull you out of your own head and join you to the world by demanding submission to hard realities that aren't addressed to you, in stark contrast to attention captured by stimuli that are engineered for that purpose.