A more real education

In the wood shop I've been working on thick curly maple table tops, shaping them along both ends and along the front, making them appear less massive despite their mass. I've made a shim that will allow a routing on the underside to pass deeper at the center of the cut, adding additional interest to the design. How can I describe what I have in mind? A picture when you see it will suffice.

William James book, A Talk to Teachers on Psychology published well over a century ago, tells the essential truth about learning that all educators (and parents, too) should study in depth. 

James, one of the famous founders of modern psychology, was an advocate for manual arts in school for the following reasons: 

Constructiveness is another great instinctive tendency with which the schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing, setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for, from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are two names for the same manual activity. Both signify the production of change, and the working of effects, in outward things. The result of all this is that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really the foundation of human consciousness. To the very last, in most of us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the notion of what we can do with them. A 'stick' means something we can lean upon or strike with; 'fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves, or burn things up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things together. For most people these objects have no other meaning. In geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by going through certain processes of construction, revolving a parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives. An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction and to object-teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods. They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave impressions durable and profound. Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might have been rescued by a more real education.—William James

So what might a "more real education" do? For one thing, it might help some young people to find greater meaning in school, more reasons to attend, more reasons to pay attention. By deepening the relationship between the concrete and abstract, putting real tools in student hands, they would sense their own creative powers be much more likely to avoid guns and the idealization of destruction in their search for identity.

In the woodshop, in making table tops, I've employed a variety of tools, each demanding deep attention, while also reinforcing a sense of self. A photo is shown.

Make, fix and create.