How can we?

How can we get the point across? That children should be doing real things in school?

Cutting the stem for a boat is easy and quick if you know how and have the right tools. Seeing the stem held in the vise just so, allows me to see that it will at some point cut water.

Cutting a new stem for education, directing students back toward creative engagement in the real world is not so easy.

Yesterday I got a request for the Clear Spring School woodworking curriculum to help a friend pitch the idea of wood shop to a new charter school forming in Indiana, but my friend noted that talking woodworking to educators is like landing from a strange and distant planet. That was not always the case.

Simplified, the set of circumstances is this:

Those who learn easily from lecture and from books are advanced rapidly through school and end up going to college where a certain proportion of them are inspired to enter the field of education. They become teachers whose primary knowledge of learning is through lecture and through books and who make the assumption that others must either learn the same way or are impaired.

But just as all children do not walk at the same exact month, not all children are ready to read in the same exact year. So they are propelled through schooling as though they must be expected to do these things, and where the system fails, the students are isolated for remediation that assures them they are forever dumb.

Today I am in search of additional wood for boat building as I wait for supplies to arrive.

Make, fix, create, and transform education to allow students to learn lifewise.