on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
Sir Walter Scott is making a general argument here against kids getting taught shop class and becoming hobby makers.
Scott is a Scottish laird with a lot of friends in the aristocracy, and his main concern is that dilettante tech-hacking muddles class distinctions. A hobby tinkerer is “a trumpery gim-crack kind of a character who is a mechanic among gentlemen and most probable a gentleman among mechanics.”
Scott engages in quite a lot of architectural and agricultural innovation himself, and he’s so scientifically literate that (although he’s a novelist) he’s also the head of the Royal Society in Edinburgh. But when he does this, he always hires it done by skillful craft professionals. Messing about with saws and hammers when it conveys no clear benefit to you, it’s just no good for you or for society generally.
It might be useful to know if you’re a survivalist trying to live in America.
http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/etexts/etexts/letters.html
….there is no great use in teaching children in general to roof houses build bridges — which after all a carpenter or a mason does a great deal better for 2/6 a day.
In a waste country like some parts of America it may do very well, or perhaps for a sailor or a traveller, certainly for a civil engineer. But in the ordinary professions of the better informd orders I have always observed that a small taste for mechanics lands in encouraging a sort of trifling self conceit founded on knowing that which is not worth being known by one who has other matters to employ his mind on and in short forms a trumpery gim-crack kind of a character who is a mechanic among gentlemen and most probable a gentleman among mechanics.
…what good did Mr Edgeworth’s knowledge of mechanicks do to him or to the world except that he made a Carriage go [on two wheels] which would go much better on four. You must understand I mean only to challenge the system as making mechanics too much and too general a subject of education and converting scholars into makers of toys.
Men like Watt whose genius tends strongly to invent and execute those wonderful combinations which extend in such an incalculable degree the human force and command over the physical world do not come within ordinary rules. But your ordinary Harry should be kept to his grammar and your Lucy of most common occurrence will be best employd on her sampler instead of wasting wood and cutting their fingers which I am convinced they did though their historian says nothing of it.