What School Didn’t Teach Us: Your Place in the World

Welcome to the final installment of our summer series, “What School Didn’t Teach Us,” where six writers have shared the lessons they’ve learned outside of formal education. Yesterday, Hadley Freeman wrote that attending highly academic private schools left her unable to think for herself for years. Today, Matthew B. Crawford describes how, as a teenager, doing manual labor gave him a place in the world.

I began working as an electricianʼs helper shortly before turning 14.

This was in 1979. Since the age of 10, I had been living in an ashram, the name given to communities of Hindu ascetics who retreat from society and devote themselves to a higher calling. Our community was small, a few hundred people, and committed to a sect called Siddha Yoga. It’s a sect that prizes seva, or “selfless service.”

A chronic seeker, for years my mother had bounced through every flighty offering of the countercultural Human Potential Movement. If the communal aspect of the ashram offered her release from the demands of being a single mother, it offered me release as well—from her. Males and females were generally segregated in the ashram, so I saw little of my mother and sister. This suited me just fine as an adolescent boy. As for my father, I hadn’t seen him in years.

The ashram’s headquarters were in India, but periodically the guru would strike out into the West and bring along his followers, so we would be itinerant for a year or two. Our usual practice was to find some rundown property in need of work, spruce it up nicely, live in it for some time, then sell it and move on with our “world tour” to seek more converts. That year, we were renovating a dilapidated hotel on Miami Beach.

In Florida, the day came when I was recruited by the electrical crew, perhaps because I was skinny—small enough to fit into a crawl space too tight for anyone else. A crawl space—the spaces between a building’s floor and the soil or, as in this case, between its ceiling and roof—is where much of a building’s unseen mechanical infrastructure lies. My mission was to traverse the narrow gap above the ceiling of what would become the meditation hall and map whatever electrical engineering I found up there, with pen and paper, so the crew could get a picture of what we were dealing with.

With this assignment, I knew I had been asked to join the men.