Have you ever noticed just how much you use your hands—touching, gripping, sorting, folding, pressing or wiping with them? Exploring textures, gauging hot or cold, wet or dry? Holding and manipulating an object? Whether they are pointing, picking, pinching, smoothing or soothing—the list goes on and on—our hands are rarely at rest. Even when we speak, our hands are engaged, drawing out our words and phrases with gestures that give added dimension and emphasis to our thoughts.
In fact, our hands perform an astounding array of discrete actions each day. It’s no exaggeration to say that every facet of human existence, from the artifacts that inhabit and enrich our daily lives to our grandest cultural achievements, was touched by human hands. And yet, we rarely notice.
From one perspective, this is no problem: we function more efficiently when some of our hand skills, practiced from birth, are employed automatically and unconsciously. But because our hands are so closely integrated with our brains and so seamlessly responsive to our thoughts, we tend to overlook and underestimate their greater significance in shaping our individual lives, our culture, and our society. Even more, in America today, we intentionally eschew handwork, preferring the remote-controlled or battery-operated instead. We design things that are “easier to use”— meaning, without manual effort or skill—when those efforts and skills are in fact what can offer the greatest pleasure and growth of intelligence and character and are the building blocks of a meaningful life.
We also design our children’s schools to be hands-off environments, where the eyes and ears are engaged but the hands are too often required to remain in the lap. As a result, we have created an educational divide between hand and mind, emphasizing academics and relegating arts and crafts, if they are presented at all, as extracurricular activities. This bias persists into our society at large, ignoring or disparaging the value of the hands’ contributions to economy and culture.
Worse, is that by leaving the development of skilled hands to be something apart from schooling, we have closed doors for our kids, that open would have given cause for deeper engagement and lifelong confidence in learning.
Hopefully the book will go on from there (and from here). What I had at first intended was a philosophical treatise. It is a thing I've been trying to get my head around for 18 years. I've begun to realize that much of what's needed is a clear path of instruction on how to get going with it. Philosophy alone is not enough.
Make, fix, create, and increase the likelihood that others learn lifewise.
Really glad to hear you're writing this book, Doug! I've felt for a long, long time that it's needed, and there's no doubt that you're the one to write it!
ReplyDelete