People who teach woodworking tell me that new friends often show them the old things they made years before in woodshop. The things we make in wood have a particular energy that assures their longevity, and even when they are no longer useful or practical, they may have sentimental value that insures their place in the home.

Bengt Svensson attended the summer classes at Nääs in the late 1950’s worked for 40 years as a Sloyd teacher and then became a professor at the Department for Aesthetic Art (Sloyd, Handicraft and Design) at Linköping University, Sweden. From his home near Borås, fifty kilometers northeast of Nääs, he learned of an elementary school teacher Sven Alfred Kjellgren (1864-1937), who studied at Nääs Sloyd Teacher Training School for six weeks in 1898. His students made the objects of the 1902 model series, which took them just four lessons per week in grades 5 through 7.

Svensson met some of Kjellgren’s students, who had saved their sloyd models for over 60 years, and by following connections between students and their families, he managed to collect and photograph the entire 1902 model series which he has made available either on CD or by internet download from his website www.formitra.com. The collection also includes information about the intended educational value of the series.

Educational Sloyd was firmly rooted in the educational philosophy of Freidrich Froebel, the German educator who invented Kindergarten. The addition of Sloyd to Schools was seen as a way to extend Froebel’s theories beyond the earliest years of education. The key to an understanding of the use of Sloyd models rests in Froebel’s concept “self-activity.” Through the careful arrangement by skills used in the making of the models, a student would learn from one model nearly, but not quite everything required to complete the next, which was designed to add one more layer of skill and complexity, enabling the student to tackle the next. And so on. Through following the complete model series the student could not only develop a set of skills, but would also come to a full understanding of themselves as self-directed, self-motivated learners.

A uninformed viewer might think, “Look they’re making stuff.” When in reality, they are engaging both the material world and their own metaphysical and psychological landscape in much more subtle ways. As stated by Otto Salomon, “the value of the child’s work is not in the objects made but in the child that has made them.”

That these Sloyd models were kept and valued tells that they are much more than mere objects. They are treasured marks of conquest and learning, and also reflect relationship with a much-revered teacher and method of an earlier time.