I grew up a witness, Mike Rose writes, to the intelligence of the waitress in motion,

the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line.

This then is something I know.

The thought it takes to do physical work.

In all our debates about standardized testing, the information economy, and the future of

liberal arts education, we may risk to narrow a view of the way the physical, the human,

and the cognitive blend in all kinds of learning and in all work that matters.

Mike Rose's expansive wisdom could enlarge our civic imagination on big subjects at the

heart of who we are, schooling, social class, and the deepest meaning of vocation.

You and I both know people who are doing work that the culture at large from a distance

when say is really meaningful and they're miserable.

There is unhappy as can be.

You know, the miserable lawyer, the unhappy neurosurgeon, right?

Meaningfulness is a more fluid and rich and variable concept, I think, than we tend to

imagine.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Being.

Mike Rose is a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

He grew up in Pennsylvania among Italian immigrants.

His father was chronically ill and his mother supported their family as a waitress.

How would you start to tell the story of how and when you became attentive to what you

would call the spirit of education?

Maybe you wouldn't have called it that then, but what you now think of is the essence

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