In 1989, Hurricane Hugo devastated the coastline of South Carolina. In the aftermath, as historic homes and buildings were being repaired, many homeowners looked for plaster workers or stone carvers. To everyone’s surprise, there weren’t many left, resulting in a massive backlog of restoration and preservation work.

In response, a group of inspired educators founded the American College of Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston. Their vision is to restore the crafts of tradesmen and tradeswomen. Modeled after the French system of the Compagnons du Devoir, they are trying to reproduce the medieval guild system in the contemporary world. A guild did two things. First, it policed its craft. Guilds, rather than the government, set and oversaw standards, deciding who was qualified and what was quality. (True, there was limited entry access; today, thanks to a push toward equality, disadvantaged people, women, and minorities can more freely enter the trades, and we are better for it.) Second, training was open and shared. Because apprentices were part of the guild, they had a wealth of resources to draw on and masters to learn from. Unlike today’s business world, it was not primarily competition that spurred the guilds forward, but a desire to do good work and become better craftsmen.

Rather than teach quick, easy processes with cheap materials, ACBA aims to train men and women to create and preserve beautiful, lasting structures. As you walk around its small campus underneath an overpass in downtown Charleston, you notice that the building is decorated with projects from students and professors. Architectural carpentry students made the entry doors. A chandelier made by blacksmiths hangs over the entryway. When I visited, students were working on a plaster installation. These final projects “proved” students belonged to the guild and could enter the workforce performing quality work worth of and respect. The building was beautiful – and the beauty was developed in-house.

ACBA is in the business of making good things. Good work doesn’t just come from technology, techniques, or principles. As Wendell Berry suggests in The Unsettling of America, “It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared – a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love.” In this way, they are a part of a living tradition that passes crafts on in embodied ways but remains open to refinement and improvement. They aren’t closed to innovation, but the innovation must preserve the good of the tradition. In his 2006 New Atlantis essay “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” Matthew B. Crawford calls for manual and technical competence. He writes, “The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way.”

Unlike most vocational schools, central to ACBA is a curriculum that integrates trades with the humanities, with a liberal arts core to train educated artisans. Many students come in with a passion for their craft, and ACBA shows them the craft’s history, why it matters, and why it’s worth preserving. Their particular trade classes allow them to apply that knowledge practically. This seamless education means that students will be drafting different columns while learning about each the history of each column style and discovering in math class how the Pythagorean theorem applies to their structures.

These connections make for a human education. In their beginning drafting course, students sketch the human body because good work is human-scaled, as are the good works it produces. Though not religiously affiliated, this notion echoes Catholic social teaching: “The beginning, the subject, and the goal of all social institutions is and must be the human person” (Pope Paul VI, Gaudium et spes). The whole human person is both mind and body, and ACBA is forming craftspeople in traditions that make for a more humane and beautiful world. In a world of industrialism that uses cheap materials for cheap products with cheap labor, ACBA reimagines a way of work that endures.

Why Don’t All Schools Do This?

A divide between head and hands, intellect and practical skills, can be traced to the very beginnings of Western philosophy. Plato imagined a society governed by a philosopher king. Reason was the highest of human goods, and lower-class citizens consumed with practical tasks weren’t expected to have the time or intelligence to contemplate higher things. Leave the philosophizing to the elites.

It would seem that in modern times, this divide has benefited the practical arts. Industry has pushed schools and universities to train more effective cogs in the machine. Give the kids practical skills. As Wendell Berry notes, education shifted from “the broad, ‘liberal’ sense to ‘practical’ preparation for earning a living to various ‘programs’ for certification. They first reduced ‘liberal and practical’ to ‘practical,’ and then for ‘practical’ they substituted ‘specialized.’ And the standard of their purpose has shifted from usefulness to careerism.” Modern people are shaped by their education to make and spend money. And education itself becomes a commodity: appeal to the consumer mindset, don’t make it too challenging, and remember: it has to be entertaining.

But no educational vision that separates those who will use their heads from those who will use their hands is whole or healthy. The body cannot be healthy apart from the mind, nor the mind apart from the body. A complete education comes in reconnecting and reconciling the two.

Historically, more than a few visionaries have pointed in this direction. After World War I in France, Simone Weil imagined an apprenticeship program that also involved participating in an intellectual culture. In addition, she wanted students to experience abandoned rural areas as they learned trades and engaged in learning. She saw this as a way for them to appreciate the places they came from and to become rooted.

In the United States, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin had a reconciling vision in the Catholic Worker movement that included roundtable discussions, houses of hospitality, and an agronomic university. Intellectual conversation, care for the poor, and care for the land. Sign me up.

I now live and work in the shadow of Black Mountain College, an innovative and influential art school that ran from 1933 to 1957 and combined a humanities core with an arts education.

Yet, though there have always been notable alternatives, most modern educational systems aim at specialization rather than wholeness. In our default career training, we try to fit personality types and personal interests with professions. How can we instead encourage wholeness in each student?

A Human Education

Another example of a new school that pairs liberal arts with vocational training is Harmel Academy, a Catholic trade school for young men in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Harmel also developed out of a need. It was founded by tradesmen who were finding it difficult to find reliable, skilled workers. There are plenty of Catholic schools and colleges, but they wondered why there were no Catholic trade schools. So, in 2021, they founded one.

Since then, the question that animates the school has moved from “Why isn’t there a Catholic college that focuses on trades?” to “What do men need that they’re not getting in today’s world?” The first question addresses an economic or academic problem: “We need more tradesmen, so we’ll train them.” The latter gets closer to the root of a spiritual problem. Young men are not merely unequipped with skills or uneducated in the humanities. In the modern world, many are disconnected from their identity as human beings. As David Phelps, president of Harmel, has written, “What is needed is not simply curricula and conferences focused on the formation of men. What is needed is an integrated spirituality, a grounding of one’s manhood in the life and service of Christ.”

In the encyclical Laborem exercens, Pope John Paul II writes, “Work is a good thing for man – a good thing for his humanity – because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being.’” In discussing this with me, Phelps pointed to the incarnation of Christ. Christ was an apprentice to Joseph. He was a tradesman who learned by doing. His embodiment serves as an example of encountering and serving God in and through work. These are not only ideas or skills but a way of living and a way of seeing. Phelps is fond of quoting lines from Irenaeus: “For the glory of God is the living man” (Against Heresies, 4.20.7). But he also points out the line that follows, which isn’t quoted as often: “and the life of man is the vision of God.” Becoming fully alive is about seeing God, and encountering God happens in work – even in the trades – when work is prayer and an extension of worship.

If this emphasis sounds monastic, that’s because it is. Harmel Academy takes its scaffolding more from the monastic tradition than the Scholastic tradition. A typical day includes morning prayer and evening vespers. In between, students are learning in the workshops or completing twenty hours per week of on-the-job training. Over lunch, they may be working their way through one of their humanities courses. The humanities taught at Harmel are also centered on that paradigm of man: Jesus Christ. Because he is the perfect man, they learn the story of Jesus. They learn to be an apprentice of Jesus. Through discussion and application, they come to know ways of life, not merely theories. Students learn about a variety of callings: not just the call to a particular profession, but also the call to be a forgiven sinner and a saint, a brother and son, a neighbor, and perhaps a husband and father. The humanities sequence often starts with students’ passion – say viewing the movie Ford v Ferrari. How do all of these skilled workers come together to make something great? Then, the conversation may turn to an assigned reading in Aristotle or C. S. Lewis about friendship, and the students discuss what it means to be a good friend.

Often, the students attracted to this program feel like outsiders in mainstream education: they don’t like school but like working with their hands. At Harmel Academy, they find their type of people in community. It’s a relief to fit in and to be good at something that most schools don’t value. If Christ came as a laborer, perhaps they can live into their sanctification by becoming workers like him.

Is College Too Late?

In an educational system oriented toward careers, how do we get students reoriented toward a more embodied, humanistic vision of life and vocation? If these ideas are introduced in colleges, it will help, but it will always be an uphill battle. In early 2010, the Bruderhof, the Christian community that publishes this magazine, decided it was time to start an alternative high school that connected learning the humanities with practical skills. In 2012, the Mount Academy began at a former Redemptorist seminary on the banks of the Hudson River in Esopus, New York.

The Bruderhof takes a holistic view of education. The Mount Academy is not a technical school or prep school; it’s also not a music conservatory or athletic powerhouse. Yet it is all of these things. Its philosophy consists of “head, heart, hands.” It offers students opportunities to grow into their full human capacities and interests; its classes and clubs include welding, dance, agriculture, environmental science, art history, woodworking, and culinary arts. Students may read Plato or Shakespeare during the morning and then participate in a more hands-on activity in the afternoon, such as constructing a modular house for Habitat for Humanity in the school parking lot.

The Mount Academy’s integrative curriculum recognizes the value of each student. One student may be more inclined toward academic rigor, another toward music, another toward a particular trade. In a one-size-fits-all approach to education, certain types of students are typically valued (the academic and athletic). But if every soul is of value, then each student brings something valuable to education. The Mount Academy provides each student with opportunities to grow into the person that God created him or her to be. As principal Barney Winter told me, the challenge is to help students come out of themselves and branch out in their interests. This expansion of the person is where meaning is found. When meaning or purpose is found, students can be nurtured to be loving and caring persons. Isn’t that what we want for all students?

What Students Need

Modern students seem to have a lingering despair that is more felt than articulated, though it is evidenced in countless studies of their mental health. Could part of the problem be an educational system that ranks and separates them according to how it values them, instead of teaching them what gives every life value?

E. F. Schumacher’s influential 1973 book Small Is Beautiful provides a take on education that holds true fifty years later. He writes, “If, therefore, a man seeks education because he feels estranged and bewildered, because his life seems to him empty and meaningless, he cannot get what he is seeking by studying any of the natural sciences, i.e. by acquiring ‘know-how.’… It tells him a great deal about how things work in nature or in engineering: but it tells him nothing about the meaning of life and can in no way cure his estrangement and secret despair.” Without a humanities or liberal arts core curriculum, we will continue to develop students who live in this malaise. They need to know how to be human.

But at the same time, if we only give students ideas, their embodied selves flounder. They can’t live from their heads. Their lives include their bodies. The world of the mind is enhanced by activity in the physical world, including working with their hands. So often, we invite our students to learn through reading. (And I’m an academic. Three cheers for reading!) More often, though, people learn by doing. A whole education will include technical and practical skills. A human being fully alive has a brain and hands that can participate joyfully, creatively, and productively in a task.

Out of the modern malaise, many visionary new schools are forming. I’ve described three, but more are emerging, including the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, a Catholic school in which every student will learn a trade and receive a liberal arts education, and St. Dunstan’s Academy, an Anglican boarding high school for boys in rural Virginia. We could easily imagine more integrated schools like these: trade schools that teach the foundation of craft alongside its history and technology, or classical schools that put industrial arts classes in their core curriculum, or colleges that develop a garden where students can learn agriculture and food preservation as they stock the pantries of the school’s dining halls. Why should there be a stark divide between these things, between the academic, artistic, natural, and technical worlds?

In 2018, David Brooks’s New York Times column featured a school named Cometa in Como, Italy. The school, which teaches foster children, is based on the educational philosophy of Luigi Giussani, which emphasizes beauty because beauty educates. As Brooks reports, “The vocational high school curriculum is built around the idea that machines will soon be doing most physical tasks, but no machine will be able to create the feeling of a loving home. Whether they are being trained as waiters, carpenters, fabric designers, or pastry chefs, students are taught to understand and create hospitable experiences.” As Cometa CEO Alessandro Mele puts it, “Everything says, ‘Welcome to my home.’”

The modern economy was built on the work of hands: agriculture, industry, manufacturing. We’ve shifted toward a head economy: accounting, management, information technology. We now have a choice: either become even more technological and technocratic, or find ways to return to a more human-centered, head-heart-and-hands economy. A robot can say, “Welcome home.” But it takes a whole and humane education to form people whose hearts and hands know how to truly make a home and extend a welcome.