Studio stroll

Every Thursday at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts, while classes are in session we have a "studio stroll," in which members of the community are invited to visit the studios and see what the students have made and what they have learned.

Let this serve as your invitation to attend this afternoon from 4-5:30. Snacks will be served.

Yesterday, Peter Korn called from the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. His school in Rockport, Maine is planning to begin educating woodworking teachers in 2018, and Peter wanted my advice on who to contact to bring a fresh student body to support the growing need for wood working teachers in schools. I have been associated with the New England Association of Woodworking Teachers since its inception and alerted him to that organization as a possible resource. It seems that our nation has begun to reawaken to the need for Career and Technical Education and the insistence that "All kids must go to college," is nearly dead. Now there is a desperate need for teachers trained in the manual and industrial arts. The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship will be attempting to help.

Overly simplistic mantras like "All kids must go to college," miss the point. Not all students are ready for academic work at the same time. Few students fit a tight developmental timeline and even those students benefit from the opportunity to do real things. Rigid and unresponsive schooling fails to take student readiness into consideration. Manual arts, music, the arts, laboratory science, field trips, and the like prepare students for life.

In wood shop, you do not just learn how to do things, you construct frameworks for better understanding of the world and of yourself. The new movement for industrial arts appears to be just like the last, driven by economic concerns rather than being motivated by an understanding of the broad effects of hands on learning. So it would be good if we helped educational policy makers to understand the theory and purposes of Educational Sloyd.

Join us at the Studio stroll and see real learning and growth in action.

Make, fix, create, and discover the joy of assisting others to love learning likewise.