Review 70: The Mind at Work

The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker by Mike Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought this book was going to be like the description, a bit like Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America and Terkel's Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do books, but that is not quite the case.

The book addresses the intelligence, the level of the mind while working at blue-collar type jobs. Society has not acknowledged the level of intelligence these people have that do these types of jobs. Mike Rose explains how people's understanding of intelligence has changed over the years, and this too is one area that needs to be modified. It takes the entire book to come to this conclusion, providing several long examples, and several briefly. A couple of the long examples come from his own family, while others from observing high school classes in vocational education. There are other examples as well, ranging from welder, hair dresser to a surgeon.

One of the later chapters delve into the education of students taking the two tracks of vocational verses academic. This part was unexpected for me. Rose explains how this does a great disservice as the students in vocational education route aren't challenged to their full extent and even come to believe their own intelligence is more limited than it may be, or they denounce intelligence as a way of compensating. Students get placed into programs often by income level backgrounds, or parental jobs. Other issues of how the two tracks differ and perpetuate problems are explained. This chapter felt like there were arguments that came before, for those in the education field may be better versed in the discussion. This chapter also felt like the thesis of the book, what the previous chapters were leading towards.

Mike Rose comes at this topic as a scholar in the field of education. He is a professor in education, yet he writes this book in a fairly approachable manner.

While the book was decent, and he took years in research and writing the book, it felt like there was missing quite a lot as well. Most of the book was about only a few job categories and only briefly mention others. It would seem the book would have been stronger with more details on more job areas, take those curiously mentioned and expanded upon, perhaps cutting down some other areas, or not. The book wasn't overly long.

After reading it entirely I would doubt the book would get a large audience outside of the academic world in the education field. I seem to have a large area of curiosity and love learning, so I continued the book where it veered from my primary interest. Certainly there are other people out there like myself, yet educators will likely gain the most from this book.