making your child smart...

Today I have a staff class at ESSA in which I'll be teaching and assisting staff members to make wooden boxes. We will go through tool safety and I'll lead my students through a series of operations all aimed toward leaving the class with finished boxes.

Some place I'd read that parents of the poor had objections to manual arts training as it was a way to prevent the advancement of their children into more lucrative studies, and to keep them in their proposed place. Woodrow Wilson had stated as president of Princeton University that: 

"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."

You can see where the idea came from... that an advanced social class resulting from academic education would be served by a lower class drawn from the poor.

The point that too many have missed, is that you don't teach carpentry in schools to turn students into carpenters. You teach it to help all students become smart, and even the children from the upper classes deserve to become smart. 

The image shown is a simple way to shape a lift tab for the front of a box lid, using the table saw to get consistent results. A pencil holds the stock in its nest cut in a piece of 1/8 in. thick MDF.

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