building the connections between things.

Some of my students in woodshop told me that they are designing a classroom board game and needed game pieces to be turned on the lathe. I turned these following their instructions and close supervision. 

Of course woodworking is a collaborative experience as is much of life. We work together on things and step in to play our own parts, which in this case for the students became sanding and then coloring of the game pieces using crayons. 

We each bring forth skills and interests that augment the whole. And of course that's one of the problems with education that attempts to separate us into classes. There are social classes, and classroom classes and being stuck in one or the other may offer value to those who manage others and assert power over others, but don't bode well when it comes to growth.

Back in 1917 President Woodrow Wilson, a known racist, signed the Smith-Hughes Act, separating the manual and industrial arts education from the education of those he considered destined to become the masters of society. As President of Princeton, he had said, 

 "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."— Woodrow Wilson 

Wilson said nothing about assuring the dignity of the working class. And so as there's a resurgence of interest in Career and Technical Arts Education, we must go to great lengths to assure ALL that being able to do various difficult things as necessary and needed by society is not the end of learning, but the start. There must be no dividing line between classes.

In the ideal world, schools would hum with activity and the making of things that brought relationship and established deeper connections.

Make, fix and create. Assist others in learning likewise.