[Pietro]

This is an interesting essay.

I learned a trade and then went to school. That works out nice if you go into management because you understand what physical work entails. Plus you can speak the language.

Also, its a lot of fun doing physical work when you're young; after 40, not so much.

[Svartalfiar]

What is it about physical work, in its supposed eleventh hour within a rapidly changing Western culture, that still intrigues us?

All-in-all a decent article, but I would say this: Physically work gives a sense of accomplishment that others can't. You know that you, with your own two hands, built/destroyed/whatevered something, while a professor doesn't get much beyond an occasionally student having a well-written paper. An office paper-pusher can finish a big deal, but it's just paper in a stack, and there's a lot more where that came from. But the physical exhaustion coupled with the visual of what you made, is so much more gratifying.

[Albion Wilde]

I just paid a few thou for house renovations and car repairs. So I’d say yes.

[Albion Wilde]

If incoming Yale students’ orientation or first-year community service required them to cut the quad’s grass, chainsaw tree limbs, fix clogged sewers, and work side by side with those who did, there might be less obsession over Halloween costumes and a greater reluctance to curse at faculty with the secure knowledge that they would only politely nod and smile back.

There is an well-regarded prep school in Maryland called McDonogh School that, besides vast sports fields and as many academic facilities as a small college, also has riding stables and yearly-planted fields of feed for the horses. One of the punishments there is for kids to muck out the stables or help with the crops. Keeps things real.