new and old tools.

Yesterday in the wood shop at Clear Spring School, we unpacked two more heavy boxes of tools sent to us by a school in New York where the tools were no longer of any use. The boxes contained brand new carpenter's handsaws, old hammers, new mallets, carving chisels, auger bits and more. These tools, like the others we received from the same school, had been stored in a closet while the school moved into robotics and other high tech stuff.

That makes me curious. Robotics are seen as preparing students for the jobs of the future, but how many adults actually get jobs in robotics? Is it our destiny to stand idly by watching machines do what we might have enjoyed learning to have done for ourselves?

Hand tools prepare students to better understand the nature of reality, something we could all use a bit more of. And craftsmanship, also, is a thing that benefits the whole of humanity.

Today I have a phone call with a school principal in Canada who wants more information about my Wisdom of the Hands program. So the pendulum swings. One school gives up what another one wants. But part of the problem has been that the developmental aspect of the manual arts was brushed aside. The school wood shop became the place where those students who were not going to college would be managed and taught while most kids were being sent on to college and would thereby avoid manual employment.

I have been working with a web designer to revamp my boxmaking101 website, allowing me to edit it more easily and making it more responsive to various devices.  It went online today. Check out boxmaking101.com For those who have visited the site before, it will look almost the same.

Make, fix, create, and insure that others learn likewise.