On Values, Work, and Opportunity

By Mike Rose

For some time now, there has been a troubled national conversation about the skills and values of young people entering the workforce, concerns about their literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving ability, and, as well, their weaknesses in the so-called "soft" job skills: punctuality, responsibility, a sense of workmanship. More recently, with the shock of schoolyard murders, a broader and more anguished conversation about youth and values has consumed us. Young people mystify and frighten us; they're opaque, alienated, asocial.

I wonder, though, if our collective anxiety is distracting us from, even blinding us to, a wide range of behaviors and values that are constructive, engaged, and laudable and, in fact, are dearly sought in our national assays of young people's lives. We don't look in the right places—which are, not infrequently, right beneath our noses—and, to paraphrase Michael Harrington, we always seem to ask the wrong questions.

I've been doing some work over the last few years that has sparked some different questions. I've been studying the cognition of skilled work, particularly as it develops in young people: the conceptualizing, problem-solving, trouble-shooting activities involved in building a cabinet or repairing a faulty circuit. This has turned out to be a rich project revealing complex thought and skill. But what has also been revealed is a range of values that would offer an unexpected contribution to our national lamentation over...