“Go to college,” I was told, as many of you were. We were lectured on the importance of college and the implication was clear, even if you were fortune enough not to have it spelled out for you: failure to go to college meant a trade and therefore a life of being a loser.

Of course, it was different if your family owned a plumbing or HVAC company and you were just following them into the business, but that’s because you were going to be a small business owner, not a plumber or AC repairman.

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But the truth of the matter is that while some college educated people do specific things that are essential for society — looking at you, engineers, among others — but when it comes to other important things, we need a different kind of person.

That includes holding onto our history .

Historian Jonn Hankins’ work in the early 2000s made the urgency clear. Hankins curated Raised to the Trade: Creole Building Arts of New Orleans at the New Orleans Museum of Art, documenting more than 50 Creole families whose knowledge and labor shaped the architecture of the city. The project captured what is often overlooked: the intangible, embodied knowledge carried through generations of craftspeople who made both the construction and continued care of our city possible.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, a vanishingly small fraction of those families remained in the city. In the years following the storm, displacement, loss and the aging of master craftspeople accelerated the breakdown of those building trade networks. Hankins would go on to co-found the New Orleans Master Crafts Guild with the goal of reviving traditional building trades and creating new pathways for apprenticeship.

Katrina exposed a lesson we preservationists cannot afford to ignore. When people are displaced, knowledge is displaced with them. When a master craftsperson dies without an apprentice, an entire body of knowledge can disappear. Preserving the built environment therefore means caring for something intangible too: the embodied knowledge required to repair, maintain and understand it.

The stewardship of this knowledge is at the center of the Bridge to Crafts Careers (B2CC) program. Through B2CC, a network to support emerging skilled tradespeople is taking shape. Participants work directly with historic materials at St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 to learn brick masonry, plastering and ironwork. We are bringing together master craftspeople, preservation professionals, employers, workforce organizations, social-service providers, educators and community partners to support the next generation of builders.

Stewardship of knowledge matters a lot to me, in part because I have my own paranoia about what the future will hold. I think that on a long enough timeline, it’s not a matter of if we need that kind of knowledge, but when.

And this is the knowledge you don’t get in your typical liberal arts program unless you somehow seek it out.

Even then, it’s not that common to find.

But I also note that there are a lot of roads up the mountain. There’s doing this kind of thing and doing it for a living.

Winston Churchill is one of the great men of history. He lead Britain through World War II, and his professional life was challenging at times. So, he took up a hobby. He laid brick.

That’s right, in addition to painting — something completely appropriate for a gentleman of the day to take up — he built brick walls for fun.

The skills being talked about in the above-linked article are the kinds of things that some people will most definitely want to do for a living, but that many others might be willing to take up as a sideline.

Either way, the knowledge itself needs to be preserved. Losing that knowledge means that later, when it’s needed, it’s too late.

For New Orleans, Katrina provided that need, but I’m of the opinion that a time of need is a lousy time to find out that there’s a shortage.

Taking up a trade as a pastime does something interesting: it lets you decide what you want to learn without any need for turning a profit. Yeah, I know, for a capitalist like me, that’s heresy, but this isn’t about work. This is about joy. You can learn how to do things just because you find it interesting.

And then you become one of those who preserves the knowledge that might have been lost, because let me tell you, trying to resurrect a skill from a book isn’t easy. I’m a Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) practitioner, and that’s pretty much what every art that falls under the heading had to do at some point or another. It sucks, it’s difficult, and you’re never quite sure if you’re getting it right.

Especially if you’re dealing with an Italian sword master who recorded his art while also being very adamant about not sharing his art with others he deemed unworthy.

Anywho, enough rambling on that…

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The overall point here is that our skills matter. They’re not going to disappear if I have anything to say about the matter.

Find the skill that speaks to you. Learn it in your off time. Learn it professionally, if you’re so inclined. Take up the tasks and be like Churchill, building walls to ease a troubled mind.

And in the end, make the society slightly more bulletproof.

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