I don’t remember ever actually learning it, but by the time I was in high school I somehow knew that there were good and bad kinds of work. Good work included white collar work in offices, professional jobs like being an engineer or a doctor, and perhaps fancy arts jobs like being a classical musician or a writer. Bad work included manual labour like being a mechanic or an electrician, and ‘unskilled’ jobs like working in a retail position or as a waitress (these were OK while you were studying, but not acceptable as a ‘grown-up’ job).

Without being told explicitly, I knew that working with one’s hands was lesser work (unless of course you were a surgeon), less prestigious, less valuable, less socially desirable and less rewarding.

In order to get the good kind of work, I knew I had to go to a regular high school, not a technical one, and then to university. I knew, somehow, that the kids around me who weren’t good at school and weren’t headed for higher education, or who left my high school to go to the technical school had somehow failed or messed up and were doomed to a life of bad work, and I set my goals accordingly.

Increasingly, however, I have come to believe that this set of assumptions is not only wrong, but is also harmful. By devaluing and stigmatising manual labour, we (as a society) end up hurting students, workers, and the broader economy.

Let’s start with how this harms the economy. Most basically, when we teach kids that manual work is undignified and deemphasise practical skills in our educational curricula, we end up depriving the economy of vital skills. When kids think that learning to fix cars or wire buildings for electricity is a waste of their talents, the economy runs out of people who are able to do those very vital things. In fact, so severe has South Africa’s shortage of skilled artisans become that government has declared 2013 the Year of the Artisan, hoping to encourage learners to pursue technical education and improve the country’s skills profile.

A second economic drag comes from the fact that, by discouraging good students from pursuing manual trades, we run the risk of channelling weak students into careers that require a lot of creative thinking and that play a major role in the safety and efficiency of the country’s infrastructure. If a student is smart but prefers working with his or her hands, they should be encouraged to do so – imagine what a good job they’ll do.

The stigmatising of manual labour also does a major disservice to students and workers. For many people, sitting at a desk and studying doesn’t come easy, and for many others, the modern office environment, with its hours of sitting, rote tasks, and disconnection from the end results is thoroughly unsatisfying. Many people want to do work that is interesting, challenging, and that produces clear and immediate outcomes (myself included) and many modern office jobs offer none of those. However, many crafts and technical jobs offer those in abundance, as philosophy-PhD-turned-motorcycle-mechanic Matthew Crawford argues in his excellent book on the value of working with your hands. For my part, I have found the process of learning how to knit more intellectually challenging and engaging than most aspects of my PhD studies. Plus, at the end of it I have a hat I can wear, for some serious immediate gratification.

The government and business are taking a lot of steps to increase the number of trained artisans in the country, including building new training institutes, informing learners of the opportunities available to people with technical skills, and funding apprenticeships. This is all great news.

However, if we are serious about improving the country’s skills and the career satisfaction of workers, South Africans need to change the conversation around manual labour to reflect the complexity, value, and satisfaction that such jobs can offer.