art of Onfim...

Onfim as warrior in battle on horseback

Blog reader Jim sent links to pages about Onfim's drawings which were discovered in Russia in the 1950's inscribed on birch bark. These medieval  drawings from the 12th century show his family and friends, scenes of battle as witnessed or imagined by a 7 year old boy. We know his name, as he had been practicing his letters before his wandering mind led him into his artistic expression. The drawing above shows Onfim on a horse in battle. He's written his name above his figure  so we can see how art has always been used by children to imagine and plan their own futures and come to an understanding of their own place in life.

Froebel recognized that art, as expressed by the play with blocks, and other Kindergarten gifts, including drawing had three functions, addressing life, knowledge and beauty. Pogressive education was to develop the whole child. These days, American schooling is aimed toward developing that intelligence that can be most easily measured through the use of standardized tests. Just as administrators and politicians failed to understand the full depth and breadth of what was learned by students in wood shops, they've also failed to understand the full depth and breadth of what well trained teachers can do if restraints are cut free and children are engaged in the arts.

Onfim's Dad and Mom

The blind assumption among some is that teachers are of no greater importance than the checkout clerks at Walmart. Under that blind assumption teachers could be replaced by scanners programmed to measure the ins and outs of learning. But what about art? The whole child is not expressed in words alone. And a picture is worth a thousand of them.

These scraps of birchbark (there are hundreds of them) were preserved for hundreds of years in mud, the oxygen free ideal medium to prevent decay of organic materials.

Don't you just love Onfim's  illustrations of hands? Some have many more fingers than normal, and the hands are outsized, showing their huge significance in daily life. Why would Onfim's father 13 fingers and his mother only 6? Thanks, Jim, for the links.

Make, fix and create...

craftsmanship and the moral development of children...

In Kindergarten, the children were to build with blocks, but not knock down. When changing forms they were to move and manipulate one form into another without exercising their destructive impulses. The purpose was to give children the opportunity to develop their own creativity, not their destructive force. The following is from the Paradise of Childhood written by Edward Weibe and published by Milton Bradley, concerning gift number 7, a series of flat tablets with which the child could create patterns of life, knowledge and beauty.

"Although to some grown persons it may appear as if the images produced do not bear much resemblance to what they are intended to represent, it should be remembered that in most case, the children themselves have given the names to the representations. Instructive conversations should also prevent this drawing with planes as it were, from being a mere mechanical pastime; the entertaining, living word must infuse soul into the activity of the had and its creations each representation, then, will speak to the child and each object in the world of nature and art will have a story to tell to the child in a language for which he will be well prepared.

"We need not indicate how these conversations should be carried on, or what they should contain. Who would not think in connection with the pigeon-house, of the beautiful white birds themselves, and the nest they build; the white eggs they lay, the tender young pigeons coming form them, and the care with which the old ones treat the young one, until they are able to take care of themselves? An application of these relations to those between parents and children, and, perhaps those between God and man, who, as His children enjoy His kindness and love every moment of their lives, may be made, according to circumstances--all depending on the development of the children. However, care should always be taken not to present to them, what might be called abstract morals which the young mind is unable to grasp, and which, if thus forced upon it cannot fail to be injurious to moral development. The aim of all education should be love of the good, beautiful, noble and sublime; but nothing is more apt to kill this very love, ere it is born, than the monotony of dry dull preaching of morals to young children. Words not so much as deeds--actual experiences in the life of the child, are its most natural teachers in this important branch of education."

People tend to think that morality is a thing best taught by preaching at kids and by telling them what to do rather than by trusting the inherent nature of children to actively lead them to an understanding of their relationships and responsibilities to family and community. Kindergarten teachers were thus warned not to use their positions of power to preach at kids. Kindergarten and craftsmanship have this in common. When we are given creative tools, we learn of our creative responsibilities. We come to an understanding of ourselves as creative force. That force is measured directly by our abilities to create useful beauty in service to family and community. Kindergarten and the Educational Sloyd wood shop were intended as places in which children would develop moral character, intelligence and a sense of beauty.

I have been going through my second round of edits for my new book and there will likely be a third as we work to find mistakes and clarify text.  School is out today because of the weekend snow storm that left road icebound and dangerous. Rural roads in particular are hazardous in our mountainous terrain.

Make, fix and create...

certainty vs. possibility...

As the educational policy makers in the US are faced with yet another slap in the face by the 2012 PISA study, we are granted yet again, an opportunity to look at what we are doing in American education and to think about what we are doing to kids. Whereas the Kindergarten model focused on building the child's sense of relationship to his or her community, the child's capacity for intellectual engagement, and the child's sense of beauty and creativity, American educational policy attempts to control the input and retention of particular forms of knowledge in the hopes that they can be measured. So far, not so good. It's not working.

The Finnish brain researcher, Matti Bergström "concentrates on the child’s inner life and its – as we see it – chaotic ’possibility space’. Professor Bergström maintains that it is not only a question of ’white games.' The white games are our pedagogical efforts trying to bring up children in our own image. But there must also be room for the ’black games’ where children test themselves and the world around them. They must be given space. At a recent conference, Matti Bergström posed the question: do children need a knowledge lift? His answer was no, they need a chaos lift. We must allow children space and opportunity for the black games which are created in the unorganized and unsupervised meeting with other children.

"Very briefly, Matti Bergström’s reasoning can be boiled down to this: The core of culture is art. The core of art is creativity. The core of creativity is possibility. The core of possibility is play. The core of play is chaos. Therefore all culture is based on chaos. More than ever before do we wish to encourage each individual’s creativity and culture-creating ability. The skills of the agrarian and industrial society have long since become obsolete."

Finland, too, this year got a small slap in the face. Instead of leading the world in nearly all subjects as has been in the past, Finland's scores dropped to 5th and 6th in reading and math, while Shanghai, China leads the world as the top scoring economy (not nation). Of course, the whole thing would be described by Bergström as the white game in which one generation tries to enforce its standards, methods, values and thoughts upon another instead of allowing them to emerge through engagement in the real world. Can it be that when children do poorly in school that they, for various reasons are beginning to reject the values and methods that the school represents?

I will again repeat the basic premises of Educational Sloyd. As absurrd as this might sound, modern educators could learn a few things from progressive education from the 19th century.

1. Start with the interests of the child.
2. Move from the known to the unknown.
3. Move from the easy to the more difficult.
4. Move from the simple to the more complex.
5. Use the concrete to illustrate the abstract.

If education is not working for any particular child, a classroom, a school, a community or a nation of children, there are two directions to look. More than likely, it has lost the interest of the child, and failed to use concrete engagement of the child to sustain interest. This is where art, creativity, and physical engagement in learning come into the equation. While educators are seeking certainty to prove themselves and their methods, children are looking for possibilities. Those possibilities are available in the arts.

Recent research about how art makes you smart was conducted at our own Crystal Bridges Museum in Northwest Arkansas and described in the New York Times. Art Makes You Smart. 

Make, fix and create...

play in the snow...

Tonight I have an art show at Lux Weaving Studio on White St. Even with traffic moving slowly, there will be walkers about. We have 8 inches on the ground, and I had a day of pushing snow off the long drive with the tractor, quiet work at the "drawing board," using sketchup, and corresponding with editors and friends.

I had the unlikely opportunity to come to the rescue of a police car in the afternoon. When I arrived with my tractor at the end of my long road where it hits the highway, I found a half dozen vehicles parked including the fire chief, a tow truck, the police chief's car, a city works truck loaded with gravel and with the blade mounted on front. The drivers were standing there scratching their heads. A 4-wheel-drive police car had tried to make a run up ice-packed Grand Avenue and got stuck in the middle of the road half way up the long hill.

There was never a street in the world as misnamed as our "Grand." First, it's not an avenue, and secondly, its not grand.

In any case, the police car could not go forward up the ice, and it could not back safely down without losing control and possibly going off the side of a 30 ft. embankment. The tow truck could not get in range to be of any use. The gravel truck could not get up the hill, or down from the other side to be of any help because the police car was smack dab in the middle of the road.

They asked, "could you take your tractor up the hill and use your box blade to clear the ice?" Of course. I backed my tractor up the hill to the patrol car, lowered both the box blade and front end loader and scraped ice all the way down the hill. A second pass cleared enough snow and ice so that the patrol car could safely pass down. It took less than 5 minutes to do the good deed. It felt good to be able to come to the rescue, and of a police car, no less. It might seem silly to some that a person can take pleasure in being of use to someone else. But that pleasure is the simple glue that binds the threads of humanity into a meaningful form. It is associated with feel good neurohormones that can warm you even on the coldest day. As the police car backed safely down, I gave a two fingered gloved salute and went back to scooping snow off my road.

In our struggle against SWEPCO's unwanted power line, it seems that Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is our newest friend. It protects valuable historic properties from wanton destruction by governmental agencies or by corporations if what they plan to do involves permits to cross government lands or waterways. It seems that if the US Army Corp of Engineers does its job properly, it must be in compliance with Section 106, and cannot under any but the most dire circumstances allow the power line to be put in where it would damage the Trail of Tears or imperil the future of the National Battlefield Park at Pea Ridge. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation asks that we contact agencies to demand that Section 106 be enforced. Indeed, we will.

My art show will be at Lux Weaving Studio from 4 to 9 PM, 18 White St. Eureka Springs, AR.

Make, fix, and create...

occupations and exercises...

When you understand the fact that Educational Sloyd was modeled on Froebel's Kindergarten and intended as a means to build upon the Kindergarten method some of the parts of it make perfect sense... particularly as you begin to understand Kindergarten at a deeper level. For example, the Kindergarten gifts carried three distinct areas of the child's engagement... Forms of Life, forms of Knowledge, and forms of Beauty.

Forms of life, were objects constructed from Kindergarten tools that expressed the child's relationship with family and community. Forms of Knowledge were arrangements of objects that expressed the child's growing understanding of geometry, structure and math. Forms of beauty... what can one say? They were intended to reinforce the child's capacity to discover beauty in life, in learning, and in the universe, and to partake in the creation of that beauty.

In Educational Sloyd you can see how the Kindergarten learning model was applied in the development of models through which children would develop skill. The models were intended to be useful to the child and to real life processes within his or her community. The models were arranged to offer exercises that gradually and incrementally expanded the child's level of knowledge and skill. And of course the models themselves and the child's making of them were intended to instill a sense of the beauty of form.

Today in Northwest Arkansas, we have about 5 inches of snow with more to come during the day. This is our first winter storm of the year, and the forest outside is lovely. After a bit, I'll get in warm coveralls, and use the tractor to clear our long drive. I love those first steps in deep snow when the world appears fresh, new and untrodden. It's like taking a piece of rough lumber and making something beautiful from it, though oddly in reverse.

In the use of Kindergarten blocks (gifts 3, 4, 5, and 6), children were told to make, not knock down and destroy, and when the blocks were to be put away, they were to be neatly stacked as larger cubes, would then have the empty box placed over them, be slid as a cube inside the box carefully off the Kindergarten table onto the lid, be turned right side up and put neatly away for future use. The simple ritual meant that each time the blocks were gotten out for learning and play, they presented a perfect cube... a form beautiful and pristine. Each child would be ceremonially involved in the richness of real life, as through taking their first steps in freshly fallen snow.

Make, fix and create...

kind of a buzz...

I've been in kind of an electric buzz this afternoon due to a letter that was forwarded to me from the Omaha, NB office of the National Parks Service. It was written to inform the Arkansas Public Service Commission of their complete disagreement with the Staff's Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law concerning the power line proposed by SWEPCO that was intended to create extra transmission profits for the utility company by destroying scenic beauty in Northwest Arkansas. My readers may remember that AEP/SWEPCO had proposed one of their alternate routes to pass within 75 feet of my deck, and within clear view from historic Spring St. in Eureka Springs. The proposal was inept. The proposal was injudicious. The idea was dead wrong, and the folks in my community rose up against it... a thing unheard of in Arkansas, a state in which power companies have always gotten whatever they want.

Fortunately, and as was expected, the National Parks Service, acting in defense of the National Battlefield Park at Pea Ridge, found the utility company's Environmental Impact Statement to be deeply flawed. They also found the findings of the public service commission's engineers and attorneys in approval of the project to be reprehensible.

Whether or not the Arkansas Public Service Commission will deny the application, or whether or not AEP/SWEPCO will do the reasonable thing and withdraw their application is yet to be seen. But it seems it might be difficult for them to move forward against the National Parks Service and the US Army Corp of Engineers which would have to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act in their approval of any river crossings by the power company.

It seems that it is OK for folks to lie, cheat, steal to get what they want, particularly if they are associated with a powerful corporation. But sometimes, small folks have fierce friends in high places.

I want to thank my friends at the Arkansas Department of Heritage for forwarding this important letter. It may offer some distinct relief.

So far our snow and ice have not been accompanied by the ice that brings down trees and power lines. In the small part of Northwest Arkansas, we are breathing a sigh of relief on two fronts.

Make, fix and create...

blocks and math... not just for play.

The following is from the Quarter Century Edition of the Paradise of Childhood and concerns Froebel's Fifth Gift.

"The representation of the forms of knowledge, to which the Fifth gift offers opportunity, is of great advantage for the development of the child. To superficial observers, it is true, it may appear as if Froebel not only ascribed too much importance to the mathematical element to the disadvantage of others, but that mathematics necessarily require a greater maturity of understanding than could be found with children of the Kindergarten age. But who thinks of introducing mathematics as a science? Many a child, five or six years of age, has heard that the moon revolves around the earth, that a locomotive is propelled by steam, and that lightning is the effect of electricity. These astronomical, dynamic, and physical facts have been presented to him as mathematical facts are presented to his observation in Froebel's gifts. Most assuredly it would be folly, if one would introduce in the Kindergarten, mathematical problems in the usual abstract manner. In the Kindergarten, the child beholds the bodily representation of an expressed truth, recognizes the same, receives it without difficulty, without overtaxing its developing mind in any manner whatsoever. Whatever would be difficult for the child to derive from the mere word, nay, which might under certain circumstances be hurtful to the young mind, is taught naturally and in an easy manner by the forms of knowledge, which thus become the best means of exercising the child''s power of observation, reasoning and judging. Beware of all problems and abstractions The child builds, forms, sees, observes, compares and then expresses the truth it has ascertained. By repetition, these truths, acquired by the observation of facts, become the child's mental property, and this is not to be done hurriedly, but during the last two years in the Kindergarten and afterwards in the Primary Department."

I know this is a long thing to read without illustration, so I scanned the arrangement of blocks above from Paradise of Childhood. The complexity of the arrangement of blocks from the Fifth Gift is certainly beyond the way mathematics is usually presented, and at 5 and 6 years of age, far earlier than any complex math is now presented to kids.

These days, Froebel's Kindergarten, just like Educational Sloyd, has nearly completely disappeared from the educational landscape. Now we have Kindergarten in name only, and remote statistical examination of mathematical groupings of kids has superseded actual observation and direct understanding of the individual child. Kindergarten has become the place where reading and readiness to read have become the whole enchilada, leaving the child and our future two tacos short. Play with blocks in a Froebel Kindergarten was not just play. It was a way of developing the whole child and laying the clear path to his or her success in math and in life.

By the time my mother had become educated as a Kindergarten teacher,  the breadth and scope of Kindergarten had been shrunk to a single year, and the tools of Froebel's Kindergarten had been forgotten.  In the meantime, PISA results released just released show American students holding steady in the middle of the pack. All the attention that has been given to American education of late through standardized testing has done nothing to help us move forward. As reported by Claudio Sanchez on NPR, the results of this year's PISA study are "sobering" and like living Groundhog day over and over again. They show no improvement since 2003. I can safely warn that we won't get things right until we arrive hands first.

It is time for a true renewal of Kindergarten and a restoration of school wood shops.

Make, fix and create...

occupations...

Stand for Kindle Fire HD

 I know many of us have nighttime reading materials at bedside. The table at the side of my bed is stacked with books. One is Robert Keable Row's 1909 book, the Educational Meaning of Manual Arts and Industries, and another is Milton Bradley's Quarter Century Edition of the Paradise of Childhood. I also have a travel guide to Finland deeper in the stack and language guides and dictionaries for speaking Swedish.

Last night I was reading through a small portion of the Paradise of Childhood that described the use of Froebel's 3rd gift, which consisted of a small cube box, with sliding top and was filled with 8 smaller cubes, which together stacked to form a perfect cube. The description and editor's notes on how the gift would be used in the classroom show a remarkable depth of analysis and illustrate the even more remarkable genius of Friedrich Froebel. It was a thing he acquired by watching the development of children... not by statistical analysis, which seems to be the only tool used by educational experts today.

Simple to make with wood and dowels.

Each of Froebel's gifts were used in the classroom to explore what were called "occupations", meaning that each gift could only come to life in the mind of the child through the exploration by that child through his or her hands. The occupations were in three categories representing life, knowledge and beauty. The first was that the objects themselves could be reconfigured by stacking into a variety of forms that were representative and symbolic of objects from real life. This occupation would be very familiar to any child who played with blocks, and yet the small number of blocks in the first set led to the making of simple things that one might find in the home and that would express relationship with others. One example shown in Paradise of Childhood was a chair, that when divided became two chairs, one for Grandmother and one for Grandfather. In this manner, play with blocks became representational of community and family life.

The second set of occupations with Gift 3 was to use the blocks to further the exploration of form and mathematics begun in the earlier gifts. Dividing and rearranging the smaller cubes from the larger gave the child an understanding of fractions, counting, and early math. These days, kids are given larger and larger sets of blocks and of Legos, without ever taking advantage of the potential they offer for the early exploration of math. The description in Paradise of Childhood of how the blocks were used to develop an understanding of fractions is fascinating.

The third occupation involved the arrangement and placement of the smaller cubes on a grid laid out as a permanent part of the Kindergarten table. By arranging the cubes, graphic forms offering a sense of beauty and symmetry were laid out. These shapes actually formed the child's introduction to drawing, and imparted a sense of order and control to the child's mind.

These three basic occupations could be applied to any of the gifts, as they imparted a sense of relationship to life, the development of intelligence in geometry and math, and the child's sense of beauty and form.

When the lessons involving the gifts were done for the day, each fit neatly into its special box, teaching the child responsibility in the use of his or her tools of learning.

Can you see the depth of learning involved? Can you see that we've come a long way since the first Kindergarten, and that very little of our progress was in the right direction? We did the same stupid thing to manual arts in schools. We made wood shops the place of choice to dump kids who weren't thought to be going anywhere, forgetting that the making of real things of useful beauty, was essential to the development of character and intellect for all kids.

Today we are hoping for cold. If the temperature on Thursday in Arkansas is very cold, we'll get snow rather than ice when the confluence of bitter cold and Gulf moisture hits the area on Thursday. My students in wood shop made toy cars and helped me to design and make a stand for a Kindle Fire that will be given away in a school raffle.

Make, fix and create...