> The College of St. Joseph the Worker, which combines the trades with a liberal-arts education, is trying to restore its students’ sense of their own competence, and to revive the city of Steubenville, Ohio, along the way.
What is "the slightly toxic baggage of maker culture"? One of the things about modern life that seems most toxic to me - and I'm guessing you'd agree - is that our interactions with technology are so heavily skewed toward consumption, not creation, and what creation there is is overwhelmingly in the service of a desperate desire for fleeting online attention. If there is a toxic side to "maker culture," how can we ameliorate it and emphasize the fun, learning, and agency?
Mostly that "Makers" would best be described as "Geeks who missed shop class", and that they should understand that there were reasons for pretty much every aspect of traditional work, and that their facility with computers/technology does _not_ make them more knowledgeable possible approaches than folks who did this for a living in the past.
Article doesn't answer the (cynical) "someone else would have done it instead" aspect of the market. At the same time, is that a fallacy to believe it, sort of pop economics?
https://archive.ph/2026.04.18-174718/https://www.nytimes.com...
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