Pestalozzi at Stanz...

I have been preparing for tomorrow's classes. My 4th, 5th and 6th grade students will begin making drop spindles, for use in spinning wool. My high school students will do experimental percussion instruments as a precursor to making cajones (wooden drums).

Pestalozzi told of his objective in attempting to start an elementary school at Stanz.

"My aim was to carry the simplification of the means of teaching so far, that all the common people might easily be brought to teach their children, and gradually to render the schools almost superfluous for the first elements of instruction. As the mother is the first to nourish her child physically, so also by the appointment of God, she must be the first to give it spiritual nourishment; I reckon that very great evils have been engendered by sending children too early to school, and by all the artificial means of educating them away from home. The time will come, so soon as we shall have simplified instruction, when every mother will be able to teach, without the help of others, and thereby at the same time, to go on herself always learning."

Today at the Unitarian Church in Eureka Springs, we had a concert by my friends Kelly and Donna of Still on the Hill. They talked about  (and sang about) the Ozark Chinkapin tree and work that they are involved in with the Ozark Chinkapin Foundation to bring it back from a few remaining trees that seem to have survived the blight that killed most of them in the 1950s. We have a small grove of survivors near the town of Elk Ranch, just north of Eureka Springs, that SWEPCO will cut without qualms if given half a chance.

Make, fix and create...