Enjoying Work...

As we find ourselves surrounded by more technological short-cuts that make work easier or as we rise in economic status and hire people to complete certain tasks, are we on the verge of creating a generation of workers who don't value the tasks they are charged with completing? If so, do parents need to change how they are raising their children? Or, do people naturally get into the work groove as recognition and reward become the career carrots?

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho: How Can I Teach
My Kids to Enjoy Work?

By TONY WOODLIEF
August 22, 2008; Page W13

Recently our family moved from the suburbs to 20 wooded acres in the country. This is not because I have a deep love for nature, which is where God keeps the snakes and poison ivy. We moved because of an old-fashioned sense that our four boys will benefit from hard work. Perhaps it was too many passes by videogame display cases crowded by overweight mouth-breathers. Or seeing the glacial pace of slump-shouldered teenagers corralling carts at the grocery store. Whatever the impetus, my wife and I concluded that living where there are fields to mow, trees to cut, predators to kill, equipment to maintain and adventures to pursue would be good for our children.

Chad Crowe

They are young yet, and we are slowly training them to work. Being bookish, we figured this training should have a philosophical foundation. I thought perhaps the best person to consult for wisdom on the virtues of work would be that psalmist of markets, Adam Smith.

But as it turns out, Adam Smith's philosophy of work was that it requires one to lay down "a portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness." My sons agree wholeheartedly. Further, Smith measured wealth in terms of one's ability to hire others to do the work. I've not caught anyone paying to have his chores done, but I suspect it's a matter of time. Needless to say, "Wealth of Nations" is coming off our shelf for the time being.

The American Founders are no more help. John Adams refused to take his turn at the pump when sailing to England, viewing such labor as beneath him. His worldlier counterpart Ben Franklin had a more American attitude: "Time is money." While work itself might be unpleasant, a good man seeks the reward: riches for the industrialists, piety for the Puritans, and for Puritanical industrialists, both. Before long, not working was considered un-American.

Max Weber saw in this fusion of wealth-seeking and pietism an engine for prosperity. Alexis de Tocqueville, however, spied danger. "Love of money," he wrote, is usually "at the bottom of everything the Americans do." Though he admired American hard work, he worried that its aim was too paltry. "It would seem that their only object in rising to supreme power was to gratify trivial and coarse appetites more easily."

Much as it pains me to say it, I think the Frenchman was right. Maybe early Americans worked hard not because they found inherent pleasure in work but because they dreamed of a world with delivery pizza and videogames. And now that we've achieved that pinnacle of economic satisfaction, we're eager to follow Adam Smith's advice and take it easy.

There are already signs of the Smithian ethos on our homestead: My 6-year-old tries to reduce how often he carries his clothes hamper to the laundry room by wearing the same outfit indefinitely. My 8-year-old, meanwhile, leaves the water hose stretched out where I trip over it, so that filling the dog's water dish takes less walking. It seems that the only way, in a work-is-evil culture, to motivate a child to labor heartily is by means of avarice. But surely there's a way to teach children to embrace hard work without buying them subscriptions to Panache. Is it unreasonable to want youngsters to value work as inherently good for body, mind and soul?

The soul! Maybe churches can help. But Thomas Aquinas fretted that work distracted men from God. Protestants like Billy Graham, meanwhile, see workplaces as venues for evangelism but say little about the inherent value of labor. When every plutocrat who runs for president must manufacture middle-class roots for himself, wealth is no longer proof of piety. And work itself, many pastors claim, is destined to be miserable because of God's curse after Adam ate the forbidden fruit. So work is unpleasant, and its fruits are suspect. No wonder Concordia University's Center for Faith and Business, among a growing crowd of organizations devoted to fusing Christianity and capitalism, sums up this theology of work in the last of its Ten Commandments for the Workplace: "Be satisfied with what you have."

Max Weber is rolling in his grave.

Ironically, it's that scruffy, godless rabble-rouser reviled by capitalists -- Karl Marx -- who offers a helpful work philosophy where traditional fonts of conservative wisdom fail. Marx saw humans as naturally creative: "free conscious activity constitutes the species-character of man." Furthermore, humans want to craft loveliness: "Man . . . produces in accordance with the laws of beauty."

What Marx opposed were working conditions that stultify the mind while divorcing the laborer from a final, satisfying product. Marx railed against work that goes against man's "essential being," such that he "does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind." Anyone who thinks that description applies only to 19th-century factories hasn't labored in a fluorescent-lit cubicle.

Sure, Marx advocated common ownership of property, which he might have been cured of had he observed children around a bag of cookies. And there is the fact that millions of humans have been enslaved or slaughtered by his intellectual progeny. But toxic governance prescriptions aside, Marx certainly had his finger on a truth, I think, about humans and labor. Left-leaning theologians like N.T. Wright and Miroslav Volf, meanwhile, agree that work should be seen not as a pietist's grim duty or as an avenue to wealth but as a way of participating in God's creative order. Liberal Tom Lutz's "Doing Nothing," a book that ostensibly sets out to justify Slackerism, likewise has a beef not with work but with purposeless work.

I'm a small-government guy, but when it comes to a work ethic, I find myself siding with the left. Humans need work, and they need to see that their work has a purpose. Come to think of it, you'll hear that from any of America's countless business gurus. We're all Marxists now.

One summer I installed stairs and flooring in our stifling-hot attic. My oldest son, 4 at the time, insisted on donning his little work belt to help. I situated him in a corner with his tiny hammer and watercolor paint, where he spent hours hammering and painting while I nailed floorboards. Months later, out of the blue, he took my hand and asked when we could do that again. Focused on the heat and the weight of those boards, I'd found the work miserable. But to my son it was blissful. We now had a "secret room." And he had worked with his daddy.

Perhaps too many children fail to value work because their parents fail to shepherd them into a world where work can be meaningful. So maybe I should just shut up and get to working with a smile on my own face. As is so often the case when raising children, the qualities we want them to possess must first be cultivated in ourselves.

Mr. Woodlief blogs about family and faith at www.tonywoodlief.com¹.

	URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121935843910061763.html
	Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://www.tonywoodlief.com