This presentation is made to raise major considerations about the role of work in human development in an age that promises technological triumph over all work. For decades, American school missions have narrowed to the preparation for future employment, and while certainty about the future world of work has long been dim, digital technologies and systems such as AI and the Internet-of-Everything (IOE) are implying the imminent end of all work. But what might be the costs to human individual and collective development with the end of work and the dependence on technology? Might we have undervalued work, and might we find in Western tradition roads back to proper work, indeed vocation?

The research uses comparative historical and literary analysis and begins with a criticism of American public schooling regarding the world of work. It establishes criteria from across cultures, drawing especially from the Greeks, but also by using wisdom found in literature across ages and cultures, to locate a broader, humanistic understanding of the value of work in personal and cultural development, in words such as “vocation” and in the Greek concept of oikos. The results of the investigation reveal in the modern parlance a post-Enlightenment, social-scientific reduction and simplification of the concept of work (to, for instance, only two of Aristotle’s Four Causes), which represents a significant crisis in meaning for the modern worker and presents modern digital technology as a risky godsend. The study ultimately challenges this modern utilitarian configuration and seeks to promote a more humanistic understanding of the value of work based on classical concepts, in order that K-college teachers can better teach their students to be more discerning about this vital component of human achievement.

Principal sources are from ancient Greek culture, including Homer, Hesiod, and Aristotle, and from Benedict, Leo Tolstoy, Max Weber, Simone Weil, Dorothy L. Sayers, E.F. Schumacher, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, Wendell Berry, Richard Sennett, Jane Kenyon, and Matthew Crawford.

Keywords: Technology, work, classical culture.