People or Land, Berry?

Doing the reading for last class made me angry. Wendell Berry made a lot of sense right up until he started bashing education for luring people away from their communities. That was when I became uneasy. And then he took it further by saying that school has no purpose or usefulness when it believes its job is to prepare people for careers and when he said that choice only forces people to fail. I expected this time to be angrier still with the ending of his book. But I wasn’t. I really enjoyed the essay “A Good Farmer of the Old School”. I liked reading about Lancie Clippinger and how he manages to make his farm productive. The value both Lancie and Berry put on independence and thinking for yourself really made sense to me and I started to understand what Berry was getting at a little better.

On page 166 Berry writes, “As the price of work has gone up, the value of it has gone down, until it is now so depressed that people simply do not want to do it anymore.” This makes sense to me. I think he is absolutely right. Working in retail I see a lot of this. If you can’t meet the sales goals then you get yelled at and in many companies if this continues long enough, you get replaced. People are not valued and people do not value their work. They work so they may have money so they may continue to buy the things they need. I think to some extent Berry is trying to assert that big scale farmers are like this. They have too much work on their hands to do themselves so they hire others to do it for them. Others who have no love for the land or for the work and who are merely there because it is a living.
In many ways though I still disagree with Berry. He values families remaining in a place for generations. I understand why he values this because it does mean that families eventually gain knowledge of their land and people gain value and recognition in the community however it is very limiting. It allows for no one to ever be something else.

I see it like this. My dad works at Hannaford as an assistant manager. If I was to follow what Berry is suggesting, I would go to school to get an education that would be useful to me as a manager at a retail store. Then I would return home and get a job. I don’t like retail. That is a major part of why I am going to school. I am here at Farmington to get an education that will allow me to do something that I really enjoy. This is something that Berry advocates for. He writes that, “... the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works, not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it but only to be able to quit” all of which is a product of the industrial economy creating small tasks that gets rid of all thought. If I were to go into the “family business” mainly retail, would I not be doing the same thing? I would be doing a job that I did not care for, I would be doing it mindlessly and I would be longing to be done. Does not small family farms that are owned generation after generation condemn some of their own to this fate? Some who would rather be doing something else with their lives? So which is it Berry? Should I do a job that I love or should I stay in one place my whole life, doing what my family knows?

Maybe small family farms cut out more choices than you think. I imagine those farms can’t afford to send their children to schools that would give them a superb education. How much choice do these families have between farming and a different kind of life? If being able to choose our own lives makes us more healthy in the terms of the ability to use our brains and enjoy our work which is more important, the health of the land or the health of the people?