Cartesian split healed!

Good news at long last the Cartesian split has been healed after many years of divorce. Descartes will be chuffed! According to Mathew Crawford while doing a post-doctoral fellowship at Chicago University on social-though-he began repairing motor bikes. He enjoyed this so much and found working with his hand so satisfying-he now works part in academia and repairing motorcycles. His book: The Case for Working with your Hands-was published in the UK last month and has as the say-caused a bit of a stir. He claims that for far too long there has been too much emphasis on doing something academic rather than thinking about the benefits both socially and personally of doing something with your hands. Clearly working with you hands has a noble evolutionary history. Apparently his book is now being taken seriously-by no lesser a person than our very own secretary of state for Education Michael Gove and his apprenticeship chum David Willetts the universities minister. Some years ago the old polytechnics were re-labelled and called universities. So it appears that we may be going back to value these old skills that in many ways have been lost. Are we-reinventing the wheel? Everyone knows how hard it is to find a good plumber (unless they are Polish) or electrician-so in the future the plumber you call out may have a Ph'd in philosophy as well as a spanner-hope he doesn't put it in the works!