day 5...

This is my fifth day of making small cabinets at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts and so it will be a very busy day. My students may have some cabinets nearly finished by the end of the day.

The point of this blog is not to promote the trades in particular, but to promote an understanding of how the hands help us all to become wise, meaning a combination of  being intelligent, with greater character, sense of connection and responsibility.

Arising from the stupidity that came as human culture began to assume that the hands and brain were separate instruments with one having greater value than the other, was the idea that all students should go to college and that college offered the only path to success. A report on NPR yesterday described apprenticeship programs that would offer top students another choice. A different Road to Work, Bypassing College Dreams.  Afterall, the thing of greatest concern to most of us, and to most parents is that children be directed to meaningful and productive lives.

On a very personal level, ALL students in school should be given the challenge of making beautiful and useful things. While I do not have a simple term for the power to create, it is the foundation for greater interest in learning, and just as those who may not learn to read are missing something crucial to their success, those who know not how to make, fix and create are missing a quality equal in importance to literacy in the expression of human culture.

Make, fix and create...