"A good diamond cutter has a
different disposition than a good dog trainer. The one is careful, the
other one commanding. Different types of work attract different human
types, and we are lucky if we find work that is fitting. There is much
talk of "diversity" in education, but not much of the kind we have in
mind when we speak of the quality of the man or woman: the diversity of
dispositions. We are preoccupied with demographic variables, on the one
hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse
the human qualities into a narrows set of categories, the better to be
represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification
serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we
come to understand ourselves in light of the available metrics, and
forget that institutional purposes are not
our own. If the gatekeeper at some prestigious institution has opened a
gate in front of us, we can't not
walk through it. But as a young person surveys the various ways one
could make a living, and how those ways might be part of a life well
lived, the pertinent question for the individual may
not be what IQ they have, but whether they are, for example, careful or
commanding. If one is to find work that is fitting, one would do well to
pause amid the general rush to the gates."
http://wiki.nus.edu.sg/download/attachments/103023356/Crawford%20Soulcraft.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1358726782213&api=v2
