In yesterday's post, I shared some of stone carver Chris Pellettieri's philosophy regarding the value of hand-work over machines. I want to add just a bit having to do with the hands' dual role in both sensing and forming the craftsman's material. In considering Chris' driving or walking analogy, think of driving a bus. Does your hand on the wheel have a "feel" for the road? As a point of comparison, what if you were driving a sports car, or what if a computer is driving the bus and you are a passenger at the back, riding along in pretense of craftsmanship? Machines isolate the hands from sensitivity to the material. You feel more the vibration and rotation of the tool and less of the qualities inherent in the material. Does this lead to work of greater quality and sensitivity? Does it lead to greater quality in the relationship between the craftsman and the material? Beginning craftsman are challenged to understand both the tools and the materials. Increase the isolation of the student's hands from those materials by the introduction of power tools and you directly limit the student's understanding of the material's essential qualities. The results are two fold. First, quality dependent on sensitivity to difficult or unusual materials suffers. Secondly, the student is deprived of the tremendous sensory experience that arises through direct engagement with the material. That sensory engagement is what calls the heart to the aid of the will in the development of skill.

On a slight change of tack, I offer the following from Charles A. Hamm, Mind and Hand, 1886.

Francis Bacon: “The end of man is an action, not a thought." This is the philosophy, the rationale, of Manual Training; it is the union of thought and action, and it therefore demands the elimination from educational methods of the abstract philosophy of the Greeks. In his declaration, "All the useful arts are degrading," Plato defined the character of the revival of learning which was to occur hundreds of years afterwards; it was a revival of Greek methods, which exalted abstractions, and debased things...

Bacon discovered, and did not hesitate to declare, that "the understanding is more prone to error than the senses"; and this fact constitutes the basis of his philosophy of “things". "For if we would look into and dissect the nature of this real world," he says, "we must consult only things themselves." If we would find the cornerstone of education, we must consult labor. Nothing great is accomplished without a due mingling of drudgery and humility; for of all the virtues humility is the most excellent. The Greeks failed to comprehend the true educational idea because of their pride. They associated use with slavery, because in Greece all labor was performed by slaves; and, scorning labor, they scorned use, and, by consequence, service, the greatest of the moralities.

In my personal view, I wouldn't go so far as Charles A. Ham in his call for an end for education in the classics, but I do call for a renewal in education at all levels that includes an understanding of the dignity and value of the hands. We are at the back of the bus. The driver is asleep or drunk (hemlock or power, your guess). We have no feel for the road. Look up from your entertainment and listen to the scientists who study our climate and the impact of our insensitivity to the materiality of our existence. You will see that it is time for the call "all hands on deck."