In just a few days, I’ll be washing stacks of dirty dishes, wrangling toddlers, and changing countless baby diapers.
I can’t wait.
No, that isn’t sarcasm. I won’t be working a swanky internship this summer, but that’s fine with me. My past two summers of nannying have taught me more than any class or internship could about tenacity, confidence, and love in action.
All of us young people need to give manual work a try, and summer is the perfect opportunity to do so. It needn’t be your full-time job: Build a fence for your parents, mow some elderly neighbors’ lawns, take care of a friend’s toddler for the day.
Whatever form it takes, manual labor done well is an immensely rewarding break from the rigors — and blind spots — of student life and a necessary introduction to adulthood.
In an increasingly mechanized world, we risk losing sight of the value of manual labor. Young people — particularly those immersed in the world of online discourse — can come to devalue anything but high-minded intellectual work.
As Victor Davis Hanson argues in “Brawn in an Age of Brains” for City Journal, we’d rather pay money to work out at a gym than gain the same strength from basic physical labor. Our increasingly mechanized society, though, is not beyond manual labor — and we shouldn’t be, either.
If we make intellectual achievement the only work that matters, we’ve got it all wrong. All work can be a participation in the
