The following is the Fine Woodworking condensed version of my paper to be delivered in Helsinki next week and that will also be delivered on the Fine Woodworking website:

Tools, Hands and the Expansion of Intellect
By Doug Stowe

When I was in high school and college I worked summers and holidays in my father’s hardware store and would slip away for an hour or so each afternoon to restore an old car under the guidance of a master craftsman. While home from college my craftsman friend commented, “Doug, I don’t know why you would plan to be a lawyer, when your brains are so clearly in your hands.”

His comment was prophetic. It led me to reexamine my academic path, alerted me to the pleasure I received in learning and working through my hands, and ultimately caused me to question the artificial and unproductive separation between hands-on learning and academic pursuits.

I became a professional craftsman, then author of woodworking books and in 2001 I began a woodworking program for students 1st through 12th grades at the Clear Spring School, a small independent school, with the intention of demonstrating the value of the hands in general education. A short time later I learned of educational Sloyd, and began testing its principles in wood shop. As a craftsman, my purpose isn’t to provide statistical information but to demonstrate methods and principles that would be useful to others interested in providing quality education more capable of emotionally engaging our children.

Tools
Thomas Carlyle said: “Man is a tool-using animal. He can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountains melt into dust before him; he kneads iron as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all!”

American Psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed an interesting hypothesis: “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” In other words, our tools and our understanding of their use controls the scope of our intelligence as well as the range of our actions...

So what if the only tool we offer in education is a computer? That seems to be a question whose answer we already know. Here in the USA children are being introduced to computers in homes as early as two years of age and in schools pressures for early reading and achievement on test scores are displacing previous emphasis on learning through crafts and through play. The evidence linking screen time to a wide range of social and developmental disorders is stronger than the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer.

Dr. Glenn Kleiman is the director of the William and Ida Friday Institute and as former director of the Education Development Center, Inc. was responsible for some of the first educational software in mathematics. He stated the following about my Wisdom of the Hands program at Clear Spring School:

…children should have lots of experience with real tools and real materials. Virtual environments should be an addition to, not a substitute for, hands-on activities of all types. I developed a middle school math curriculum some years ago. When testing it, we found many grade 8 students who had never used a ruler or other measuring devices. They had seen them in books, but never used them. The importance of concrete experiences has often been missed in text-based education practices also. When utilizing computer based curriculum we believe that students should have experience with physical materials first.

The Hands
As schools have attempted to become more efficient in the process of education, children have been confined to desks with hands stilled, essentially blocking their successful engagement in the process of learning.

Current research in the new field of embodied cognition recognizes that the whole body takes part in the processing of information and human intelligence. The idea that human knowledge is “brain based” no longer provides an accurate view of who we are or how we learn. One of the areas of research involves the use of gesture. Work led by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, has found that children given arithmetic problems that normally would be too difficult for them are more likely to get the right answer if they're told to gesture while thinking. In fact, students who can use gesture in the solution of algebraic formulas have been shown to be 4 times more likely to get the right answer. Studies by Helga Noice, a psychologist at Elmhurst College, and her husband Tony Noice, an actor and director, found that actors have an easier time remembering lines their characters utter while gesturing, or simply moving.

The interrelationship between hand and tool
Charles H. Ham wrote in 1886, “the axe, the saw, the plane, the hammer, the square, the chisel, and the file. These are the universal tools of the arts, and the modern machine shop is an aggregation of these rendered automatic and driven by steam.”

In essence, tools are extensions of the basic motions and capacities of the human hand through the application of mind. As shown by the drawings at left from R.J Drillis Folk Norms and Biomechanics, the hands have been the fundamental means through which the world has been shaped and measured.
While the metric system is based on relative abstraction, earlier concrete systems of measure- ment were based on observation of the human hand and other parts of the human body. So what is it about the hands that would enable their movement to engage the intellect and make our learning more effective? The answer to that question may be of less importance than the question, How do we get our children’s hands involved in their learning?

The Demonstration at Clear Spring School
At Clear Spring School, we engage our children’s hands in learning and test Maslow’s hypothesis through the making of tools. Some of the tools enable children to do work, while others are used to expand the children’s understanding of concepts. Some are used for investigation and demonstration of scientific principles, some are used for organizing and collecting data and still others provide additional interest in classroom activities. Each project is planned in cooperation with core classroom teachers to integrate with current studies.

•Working tools are those that provide the children opportunity to do other projects, often involving crafts. Examples are looms for weaving, knives for carving, pens for learning cursive, and pencil sharpeners among others.
•Conceptual study tools include geometric solids for the study of geometry, math manipulatives, models of the solar system, puzzle maps for study of geography and plate tectonics, and abacuses for doing math problems and developing numerancy.

•Investigatory tools include windmills for studying meteorology, bug boxes and nets for catching insects, and projectile launchers for the study of trigonometry and physics.

•Organizational tools include collection boxes for the collection and display of scientific specimens, desk accessories for children’s desks, and more.

In addition, the children of all ages have a love of making toys and we use toys as tools to expand interest in specific areas of study. As examples, the children have made trains and various animals inspired by their reading. We have made dinosaurs inspired by their study of dinosaurs. as well as boats for the study of the sea, and cars and trucks for the study of economics and transportation. Much of the success of the program is rooted in the close relationship between classroom teachers and the wood shop.

The Key to our success
The fact that our Clear Spring School classroom teachers are part of the planning process, often suggesting possible projects, leads them to become active wood shop participants, working alongside the students, demonstrating their own engagement in the learning process. Rather than the wood shop being an isolated school activity, it is successfully integrated at all grade levels.