Call to Hands- A Hand Maker's Manifesto...At some point you run out of things to say. That hasn't happened yet with this blog, and yet, I know that at some point very soon, I may start repeating myself without getting any clearer or more concise in what I say. You may have noticed in American politics that if you want to get votes, you have to oversimplify the issues, reduce them to the inane, and state them in sound bites that get played over and over in the media to knock down and make foolish anyone whose greater insight or intelligence might show some promise to the American people.

There were very clear problems in selling Educational Sloyd to the world community. The benefits of woodworking for general education were far too numerous to reduce to the inane. You can read the works of Otto Salomon, or Gustaf Larsson, or Friedrich Froebel, and discover that there is too much going on to reduce it to the kinds of soundbites required to sell the ideas to the general public who are far too lazy or inexperienced, or cowed down by the intelligentsia to understand.

The challenges I have in this blog in explaining the role of the hands in learning and in the selling of hands-on education to the educational community at large are made huge by the depth of involvement of the hands in every facet of human engagement. If we talk about mental health, the hands have an important role to play. If we talk about learning, the same. If we talk about character development, which was one of the important issues in the early days of sloyd, the hands were essential. If we talk engagement in life, we know that there is no deeper engagement than to touch or create with our own hands. If we talk about human history, we see that it was a story told through every object ever crafted by man and then held by the hands of another generation. So, it is hard to get a handle on things from which a simple sound bite can be created and sold to the American public.

There is an important concept from the Theory of Educational Sloyd, the movement of learning from the concrete to the abstract. That simple concept tells that our own understanding of the broad, complex and abstract role of the hands in learning has to come through the concrete reality of our own hands. We can talk here of abstractions, but the wisdom of the hands will only be fully revealed to you when you hold a tool to a piece of wood and cut. You can only reveal it to others by placing a tool in the hands of a child or friend and provide the opportunity for learning and engagement. If you've not done it you won't get it. It's what Lance Lee and others have called "experiential learning." And experience means, put down the mouse, walk away from the monitor, pick up a tool and go to work, either in your own hands or as a teacher for others.

Abraham Maslow: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

If the only tool you have is a computer, every problem is virtual and has no solution.

It is time to take all the tools in our own hands and start a revolution.