Richita Anderson, Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:
I love the chapter on “Work” in Eli Siegel’s book Children’s Guide to Parents and Other Matters. As a New York State employment interviewer for many years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of people, including factory laborers, office clerks, bridge builders, engineers, zoo keepers, truck drivers, and others. Through them I found out a great deal about the diversity of work, the tremendous variety in the activities, materials, machines that go into getting a job done.
In clear, logical sentences that a child can understand, Mr. Siegel presents a deep, new seeing of this subject, one that takes in far more than what we generally think of as “work.” He says, “The chief thing in work is its being useful.” The chapter begins:
All people work. Work is a beginning with something and ending with something that you want and other people may want. A fine instance of work—there are many others—is the chair. You don’t see animals sitting in chairs, unless they’ve first been made by men. When first chairs were made, somebody felt he’d get along better if besides walking, running and lying on the grass or elsewhere, or sitting on the grass or elsewhere, he’d sit on something between him and the ground.
The earliest people alive—whoever they were—got along without chairs. Chairs were made for people living much later—for example, ourselves. Somebody or some people worked to get to chairs; and have them.
One thing necessary in work is a feeling of what you want. All work is a way of getting what people want. Suppose you started (and you, here, are likely a girl) with some cloth, and you wanted a little bag from the cloth. So looking at the cloth, you’d think of the bag. Then you would take scissors and a needle, or maybe do some measuring; and using scissors and needle and cloth and your hands for some time—all the while knowing you wanted to have a bag—you would, after a while, come to have a bag. You would have worked; you would have known what you wanted; and you would have got what you had in your mind. Maybe you could even give the bag as a present to another little girl. A bag could have been a want of hers, too.