fakability question...

ETS gives as their reason for not taking "noncognitive" skills into consideration in their wide array of tests like the SAT, and GRE and other more basic tests used throughout education the fact that these "noncognitive" skills cannot be easily measured without running the risk of answers being faked. So, even though they claim to recognize the importance of "noncognitive" skills, they choose to ignore them rather than apply concerted effort toward resolving the matter.

"With a strong justification for developing noncognitive assessments and ETS’s history of involvement with them, why does the organization not offer a full array of noncognitive assessments today? Why is there no noncognitive GRE or SAT subtest? The answer: Many policy makers and scientists are skeptical that noncognitive qualities can be measured reliably and in a valid way. Typically, in both research and operational use, noncognitive qualities are assessed through self-ratings. Examinees are asked questions such as, “Are you exacting in your work?” “Do you get chores done right away?” “Do you keep your emotions under control?” “Do you take time to reflect on things?” There are two problems with these kinds of ratings—the standard is not clear (i.e., relative to whom?), and they are easily faked. In almost any serious discussion of the use of noncognitive assessments, the issue of “fakability” or “coachability” comes up, and this issue is the trump card that thwarts further discussion."

In other words, they know these "noncognitive" skills are important, but they are too hard for them to reliably measure. That they choose to thence ignore these skills creates a state in which they no longer receive the emphasis they deserve. One of the important reasons they acknowledge for using "noncognitive" skills as part of standarized testing is as follows:

"An argument for noncognitive assessments is that they go beyond “academic intelligence” as Robert Sternberg (1985) puts it and tap the full range of qualities that affect and are affected by schooling. But another argument is that using noncognitive assessments may serve to reduce the test score gap, the mean difference in scores between White and Black test takers commonly observed on more narrowly focused cognitive assessments. Research suggests that there is no score gap or a reduced score gap on noncognitive assessments (Sackett, Schmitt, Ellingson, & Kabin, 2001). Combining noncognitive and cognitive test scores in a selection index would result in a reduced overall score gap."

So, in other words they are willing to ignore the full range of skills and they acknowledge the distortion in the testing of black children vs. white children but this doesn't matter enough to ETS to do anything about it. It takes a huge amount of academic arrogance to make such a major adverse impact on American education while being knowledgeable of the harm they inflict, and to thence to do nothing about it because of the vast amount of money they are raking in at the time. Skills actually fall into two convenient categories... those you can easily measure and those you cannot. Measuring one while ignoring the other is distorts the whole fabric of American education.

My own use of the term "noncognitive" is placed in quotes as even ETS recognizes the term, despite their frequent use of it is a misnnomer. They excuse themselves as follows:

"The term noncognitive, although a misnomer, is widely used in psychology and measurement. Other relevant terms are nonacademic, socioaffective, affective-motivational, and personality."

Unlike the realm of high-stakes standardized testing where there all kinds of opportunities for fraud and fakability can and do occur, when you make something from real wood, its truth of its character and intelligence is present for all to see. You cannot fake the cutting of a joint. The grain at the corners of a box was matched with care or it was not. The lid fits or does not. The work expresses care or it does not. So let's not fake our children's educations. Let's give them real things to do that promote real hands-on learning and all the important facets of human character and intellect that arise from it.

Make, fix and create...

cognitive vs. noncognitive part 4...

This morning I delivered a table to a customer. It is made of maple and cherry and was featured in my book Making Elegant Custom Tables. I had kept the table for years, and while I could have sold it on any number of occasions, I was waiting for a special home for it... The one to which it was delivered this morning.

It seems that in the minds of ETS and the American psychological community, human intelligence deserving the term "cognitive" is that which can be most easily displayed by filling in bubbles on paper with number 2 pencil. But even dogs have a way of knowing things. There are certainly other ways that human cognitive capacity can be observed. For instance, when my mother was a young first year kindergarten teacher in Ft. Dodge, Iowa, her classroom was in the basement of the school building with windows that led right out onto the playground. The bathrooms were upstairs, and so it was a challenge directing her children of which she had 30 at a time, through the daily routines. The windows offered the children a chance of escape (which they sometimes did) and at the top of the stairs on the way to the bathrooms was a long rope hanging down with a sign attached that said "pull." You can imagine the challenge facing a first year kindergarten teacher... Sixty kindergarten students total in morning and afternoon classes, windows luring children to even more interesting activities, while children learned their first words including the word "pull." The long rope on the way upstairs to the bathroom was attached to the fire bell, its sign inviting the demonstration of newly developed cognition and all the senior teachers throughout the building were watching to see how Miss Bye would handle the strain.

There was a time in America when teachers were trusted to observe and measure evidence of their student's learning, of cognitive development and growth. They were trained for such things, not just in the narrow confines of reading and in math, but in the development of the whole child. These days, 30 years after Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind and his presentation of the many ways in which we are smart, for us to have undermined the traditional role of teachers, and to have narrowed our assessments so as to marginalize the many forms of not-so-easy to measure cognition is ridiculous, destructive and absurd.

If you've been reading the last few days, you'll know that I took umbrage at the deliberate use of the acknowledged misnomer, noncognitive by the testing industry to describe those skills that are are difficult to measure. There are a wide range of them that roughly correlate with Howard Gardner's list of human intelligences. All involve cognition. They include music, dance, and the visual and tactile arts. They ARE expressions of human intelligence, though not so easy to measure with standardized tests. And I was asked, how would I describe the difference between those testable forms of cognition and those not so easily tested. To be completely honest and to avoid the repetitive use of the misnomer noncognitive, and to avoid opening other cans of worms, like "academic vs. nonacademic" the testing services should state, "We test those components of cognitive skill that are easy for us to test." It would be honest. It might humble the industry to be so honest and save American education at the same time.

Make, fix and create...

to be fair...

As pointed out by UUupdater in a comment on last night's blog post, Cognitive vs. noncognitive part 2..., I should note that the article from ETS that incited my ire over the issue of cognitive vs. noncognitive skills, was attempting to point out some of the shortfalls of the current methodology of standardized testing. In addition, it did point out in  a footnote that the term which it used consistently throughout the report, "noncognitive" is a misnomer, in other words, a term which suggests an interpretation that is known to be untrue. That the report then chose to persist in using it despite the term's perpetuation of a serious misunderstanding prevalent in the halls of academia... that skilled trades and performance art are noncognitive activities and thus of significantly lesser importance than those matters of cognition that can be most easily measured, illustrates the depth at which the industry bias exists.

I know for some, I may seem like Dorothy's dog Toto barking at the Wizard, but that Wizard and standardized testing have been allowed to become all powerful in American education. It is past time to draw back the curtain and reveal that there are other skills of hand and heart that are important in our children's educations, and furthermore in their lives...

Make, fix and create...

cognitive vs. noncognitive part 2...

Materials published by ETS, Educational Testing Services offhandedly suggesting a difference between cognitive and noncognitive skills is damning in that it tells of the distinct bias they sustain thus disparaging the value of the skilled trades, engineering, hands-on learning, and all those components of American education that don't lend themselves to easy measurement on standardized tests. To portray only those skills they measure on their tests as cognitive, while describing those more difficult to measure as noncognitive, they display their own ignorance and indifference to what it takes to craft beautiful and useful objects or to participate in a myriad of other non-academic skilled professions. You can read part one, yesterday's post here. I am uncertain what to do here. I feel like Dorothy's dog Toto barking at the foot of the Wizard. ETS is too big for one man, a woodworker in Arkansas to challenge for their arrogance. So rising up against the testing industry by myself is fool hardy at best. But to throw around terms like cognitive and noncognitive thus disparaging the actual cognition required in the mastery of not so easily measured skills is an abomination if not a crime against intelligent humanity. They should be taking every possible step to mitigate the harm they do.

Is music noncognitive? Is dance noncognitive? Is woodworking noncognitive? I would invite any of these ETS turkeybuzzards to join me for just one day in the woodshop. I (with the help of their own hands) could teach them a few things about cognition.

Make, fix and create...

cognitive vs. noncognitive...

I'm following up on yesterday's post. Evidently in the psych world, the distinction between cognitive and noncognitive, as absurd as it may seem is a real one (to them). Google "noncognitive" and see what I mean. You will find it referenced seriously in many scholarly articles all over the place as in this paper at MIT, or the following from ETS, the world's foremost testing service:

ETS is known for its work on the SAT®, Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®), National Assessment of Educational Progress, The Praxis SeriesTM, and other tests of knowledge and cognitive ability.

But does ETS have assessments of noncognitive qualities — persistence, dependability, motivation, the ability to work with others, intercultural sensitivity? Do these matter? Do they affect success in school or in the workplace?

Are Noncognitive Skills Important?

They apparently are important in industry. Employers report valuing job stability and dependability, and they often use noncognitive assessments in employee hiring decisions, for good reason. Meta-analyses (analyses of the combined results from multiple studies) have shown that noncognitive measures provide a 20% improvement over cognitive ability measures in predicting training success and job performance(Schmidt & Hunter, 1998).

You can download the ETS pdf here. It is rife with references to noncognitive skill. The interesting thing to me of course is the absurdity. First, what is skill and how can it be noncognitive? How in the world did they arrive at the conclusion that skills other than reading and math are not demanding of congnitive engagement? Are these skills for the mindless or what? Development of skill, even those that cannot be so easily measured as those in math or reading, require feedback, observation and reflection which are clearly cognitive activities unless you've been trapped in an academic or institutional environment so long as to have lost touch.

It is completely amazing to me that we have turned American education over to the testing industry, and yet we can see so clearly that they are fundamentally flawed, misunderstanding skill and expressing academic bias against it... unless that skill is one of filling out bubbles in number 2 pencil.

Some things like reading and math skills are easy to measure. There are skills and qualities of character that are not so easy to chart. But to presume one set to be cognitive and the other not, is arrogance of the worst kind. And that arrogance has been damaging to American education. It seems that those difficult to measure skills of heart, and skills of hand that matter most to our children's futures have been assessed as having no value in American schooling. Take matters into your own hands.

Make, fix and create...

non-measurable qualities of success...

Our local school officials are pleased that standardized test scores are on the rise. According to an article in our local Carroll County Newspaper, "Carroll County schools were among several listed for improved test scores on the Benchmark and End-of-Course (EOC) exams given this year." Unfortunately, there is no direct correlation between what the tests measure and the qualities of hand, mind and heart required for student long term success. Others on the horizon are looking at what they've termed "non-cognitive," behavioral or emotional predictors of success. According to Paul R. Sackett, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, the greatest predictors of student success are "conscientiousness (e.g. work ethic, dependability and perseverance) agreeableness (teamwork, emotional stability) and various kinds of extroversion and openness to new experience." Those are qualities that don't show up on standardized tests.

I have become suspicious of the use of terms like "non-cognitive". The implication is that there are elements of human behavior that do not require thought. For instance, the waiter serving you tonight's dinner might be assumed mindless by those who've fallen on the less comprehending side of the academic divide. And yet he deserves only to be considered mindless if he has forgotten nearly everything in delivering what you've ordered.

There are two areas of cognition, involving the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. Standardized testing measures only that which comes from one side, and we have to wonder when American education will remember the whole child which cannot be fully educated without music, the arts, crafts, dance, creative interpersonal problem solving, play, athletics and hands-on learning.

It will be interesting to discover down the road many years from now whether the teach-to-the-test experiment will pay off in leading children to become adults who have some drive toward their own success. But I strongly suspect, based on what we know of the left-right brain divide through study of other species, that we will have neglected the most important of that which we as responsible teachers and adults have been entrusted to impart.

Make, fix and create...

thrashing wildly through the woods...

Those of us who live in Arkansas on regular basis come into contact with those who've never been in the woods before, never floated a stream, never walked in the dark under a starry sky, and it seems remarkable, unbelievable to us that there can be those among us who have never been so touched by real life.

Back in the earliest days of the manual arts movement in the US, John Runkle at MIT, Calvin Woodward at Washington University and others had noticed that since so many of their students were no longer growing up on farms and were thus no longer engaged in hands-on problem solving from such early ages, something must be done to bring their engineering and math students up to snuff. When thumbs are left twiddling, little sense of real life is discovered. That sense of real life is the foundation for all subsequent real learning. Runkle and Woodward started woodworking education at their prestigious universities to bring real-world hands-on learning to their students in engineering and math.

Then (as now) we had the problem of schools which Eugene Davenport, Dean of the College of Agriculture and Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Illinois from 1888 to 1911 described as follows:

Schools have much to do to compensate for the fact that they take the children out of real life for a period of years into an artificial world that we call the school house. They come out of it "long" in information to be sure, but they have lost a subtle something that comes only from personal experience in real life during the days of development. We are coming at last to realize that there is more than one avenue to a successful life, that the way by the schoolhouse may not be the best for all people, and that whether it is the best will depend upon whether the school gives a true or a distorted picture of life. Is the mirror of life which the schools hold up a true one? Is it badly concave or convex at any point? If so, then that concavity or convexity needs correction.

The farm and the shop and the work of the household have a powerful influence in developing executive ability and the power of initiative quite independent of acquisition of knowledge, and if we make the mistake of substituting mere accumulation of facts for this sort of development, and sacrifice the one for the other, it is more than an open question if on the whole we have not lost more than we have gained.

I am reminded of Felix Adler's essay on the value of manual training delivered in Buffalo, NY 1888, at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. He described a meeting with an aging poet* who turned to him and said,

"That is all very well. I like your factories and your wealth; but tell me, do they turn out men down your way?"

And Adler asks, "Is this civilization of ours turning out men — manly men and womanly women?" Those are the values of character that come from hands-on learning that our schools neglect and that our children so desperately need. Do you think those experts looking for what are essentially non-measurable qualities of success will know where to look for them or how to create opportunities for them in our nation's schools?

I have a friend Ernie who is a watercolor artist. He also runs a float service on a local river. He is an expert paddler, having survived the worst of river conditions and water rescues. You could think of him as a "man's man". He told me about the tourists he meets. One thought that that the river went in circles, that he could put his family in canoes here and after a wonderful day on the river take out there, pointing immediately upstream. Another customer after hours on the river assumed he had missed his takeout point, abandoned his canoe and then spent hours thrashing wildly through the woods. He emerged from the woods looking like a scratched and half-naked madman.

I am also reminded of my friend Chon who had taken 50+ year old guests on a night walk with flashlights into a meadow. They were terrified to turn out the lights and to experience the dark night star-strewn sky for the first time in their lives.

So what the heck are we doing in American education? John Dewey had asked that schools become engaged in real life... That schools not be artificial constructs that distort children's understanding. And yet, that is what they have become. And so much more so in our present time.

Take matters into your own hands. Help your children to:

Make, fix and create...

*When asked about Adler's quote of the "aging poet," Walt Whitman said, "I guess that's me: and it is very kindly and friendly, isn't it?"

power of making...

Victoria and Albert Museum has an exhibit called "Power of Making" and my readers might find as much interest in what is said about making as the objects themselves included in the exhibit. For instance,

"Thinking by making"
"Many people think that craft is a matter of executing a preconceived form or idea, something that already exists in the mind or on paper. Yet making is also an active way of thinking, something which can be carried out with no particular goal in mind. In fact, this is a situation where innovation is very likely to occur.

Even when making is experimental and open-ended, it observes rules. Craft always involves parameters, imposed by materials, tools, scale and the physical body of the maker. Sometimes in making, things go wrong. An unskilled maker, hitting the limits of their ability, might just stop. An expert, though, will find a way through the problem, constantly unfolding new possibilities within the process."

I take pleasure in the things I have made. I also take pleasure in what I've learned in making them. The new wooden hinge on the recipe box is an example. I had visualized how it would work and then made it. And in that is a sense of agency that psychologists will tell you is essential to human feelings of well-being.
This was the first wooden hinge of this design for me. Having done one, I can visualize now how to further refine the process and will do so before writing an article about how it is made. One of the things that worked for me in making this box was a decision that came late in the game, that of extending the hinge beyond the ends of the box. It is evidence of the thinking process that takes place during the process of making even the most simple of objects. The effect was to dramatize the wooden hinge making it an even stronger element of design.

In this month's Wooden Boat Magazine, the "Getting Started in Boats" supplement is by Joe Youcha describing how building a skiff teaches math. Joe runs a program for inner city youth to build boats at the Alexandria Seaport Foundation. The article is a wonderful example of what some of us know by heart: that we learn best, we learn most effortlessly, and we retain learning longest when that learning is hands-on doing real things. Like building a boat...

Make, fix and create...

LTSP...

Folks are now talking about the need for people to get back into making things, but the new high-tech way. High-tech seems to be an idea with sex appeal for those who've never made anything before in their lives and are slightly afraid of breaking a nail. Or those who are slightly afraid of the long hours one needs to invest to develop skill.

This movement (if it is indeed a movement) is called HTSP, or "high-tech self-providing," and is described in this web page: New work centers and HTSP by Juliet Schor.

Can you imagine do-it-all fabricator machines in place of our TV's? Instead of watching TV at night, we could watch our very own small trash cans and other self created plastic objects being molded, trimmed and spit out the fabricator's side door in a variety of fashion colors. Because these are production machines in a non-production environment, we could set up Amway like customer marketing schemes to bring in just enough profit to keep feed our addiction to the making of HTSP stuff.

I am reminded of the Styron® crystals my dad brought home for us to play with in the 60's. They would melt at temperatures reached in our home oven into whatever shapes we could imagine and make molds for. My dad's idea was that big 100 lb sacks of Styron® direct from Dow® could be repackaged and sold at a huge profit through craft supply outlets. In using this wonderful product there were  gasses and fumes emitted that turned our house into an industrial danger zone. Fortunately my dad gave up on the idea of marketing home-crafted plastic products before any of us were permanently damaged or deranged, and before health related law-suits began pouring in.  We have love affairs with our ink jet printers, don't we?  We can buy one cheap and then buy expensive ink cartridges for it until its planned obsolescence. The same thing will be true of these devices that are suggested to turn our lives into creative bliss. 3-D thermal object printers? Give me a happy hammer and a cheerful saw and some real non-toxic wood any day of the week.

Out of concern for the health and happiness of others I would propose a different scene. I call it LTSP or "low-tech self-providing." Imagine if we were to take a fresh look at the pleasure and satisfaction that can come from self-supplying goods for our own consumption, but instead of insisting on high-tech banishment of skilled hands, we were to take a low tech approach using traditional tools. In honor of the past and the long heritage of intelligent craftsmanship, we might also call it Hëmsloyd. For that is what they have traditionally called cottage crafts in Sweden.

Yes, the idea of just self-fabricating stuff without skill is appealing to our generations all abuzz with high-tech devices. But we must not overlook the merits of doing things the old hard way that lifted our spirits, raised our intelligence and put a polish on our sense of self.

ABC News did a survey claiming that:

If every American spent $64 on something made in America, we could create 200,000 jobs right now.
That might sound like a lot to spend until we heard that the average American spends $700 on Christmas or holiday gifts.
So where will you spend your money this year?

Don't wait, make something beautiful and useful today and join what might become a growing legion of the LTSP, more commonly called craftsmen.

The photos above are of small cabinets made during the filming of my DVD Building Small Cabinets. These were all made with relatively low-tech tools, the skilled way. And you can spend wonderful hours making fine furnishings for your own home and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time. For some reason the high-tech folks don't seem to know that.


Make, fix and create...

Making wooden hinges...

Open, the wooden hinge is attractive.

Yesterday I made a prototype wooden hinge as a sample for the editors of Fine Woodworking. In order to keep articles coming through magazines I have to keep busy pitching proposals, and in this case, the editors wanted to actually see a box made with the technique I was describing to them. My idea is to write an article showing at least two ways in which wooden hinges can be made, and I know from teaching that wooden hinges always interest my students just as they will subscribers to Fine Woodworking Magazine.

The box shown in the photos is a "recipe box" made of black locust. The size is intended to offer the space required to hold recipe cards. The box is not finished. I will do additional sanding and apply a Danish oil finish.

Yesterday's post mentioned Calvin Woodward's "alphabet of tools." If there is an alphabet of tools, there would also be a library of techniques, and a whole language of form in the making of useful things.

The idea of an alphabet of tools was probably not original to Woodward.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) had created an "alphabet of form" breaking down the patterns required to observe, draw, illustrate and design that I had described in an earlier blog post. He also suggested that an "alphabet of practical abilities" should be designed so that manual work and physical exercises could be broken down into elements, and teaching schemes devised to develop skill.

You can see Pestalozzi's ideas more fully developed in the work of Victor Della Vos and Otto Salomon who formulated the early programs of manual arts instruction. Pestalozzi's alphabet of form has proved more difficult to use. But children with words alone and no tools with which to commence real learning are deprived of their creative capacity. Is that the world we would consciously choose for them?

Make, fix and create...

gaining an alphabet of tools

The following is from Calvin M. Woodward's book, the Manual Training School, and outlines his vision for American education.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL.
This distinguishing feature of a polytechnic school, next to the kind of knowledge it aims to give, lies in its method of combining theory with practice. Not only should a polytechnic school aim to give instruction in the scientific principles theoretically involved in every important branch of industry, but it should not be satisfied until the student himself is sufficiently familiar with the details of the processes in question, and sufficiently skilled in the necessary manipulations, to enable him to illustrate these principles himself. These two things characterize the ideal technical school, and mark the educational progress of this generation: First, the things studied and taught are of immediate importance and of intrinsic value; second, one is not supposed to understand a process or an experiment till he has performed it. You know how it is in music. I may be quite familiar with the mathematical and physical theories of music. I may have studied with Helmholz the wonderful mechanism of the ossicles of the ear. I may be deeply read in the aesthetics of harmony and thorough-bass. I may even be able to explain the exact difference between a euharmonic and a common organ. And yet, if I can not play, I am no musician. Moreover, this playing on an organ is not a manual accomplishment merely. The brain is more concerned than the fingers. It is so in every thing. What avails your knowledge of photography unless you can take a good picture, and of what worth is your engineering if your bridge will not carry its own weight, and you have designed an impossible engine? None but the wearer can know where the shoe pinches, and none but a man who has had some practice is prepared for practical difficulties. Prof. Tyndall says, "Half of our book-writers describe experiments that they never made, and their descriptions often lack both force and truth. No matter how clever and conscientious they may be, their written words can not supply the place of actual observation," and he might have added, "of actual manipulation." Theory and practice, then, must go hand in hand; and, in order that the practice may be adequate to the theory, the hand and eye and head must receive previous careful training,—the hand in the use of instruments and tools; the eye in measuring distances and angles, in detecting peculiarities of form, and in observing the details of a construction; the head in a knowledge of the common properties of the commonest material substances, such as wood, stone, iron, glass, etc. The hand is a wonderful organ, and capable of performing vastly more than it is usually made to do. The same is true of the eye. Close observation is a habit which few acquire.

MANUAL TRAINING.

Children should early be taught to use, as well as to beware of, sharp tools. Just as every boy should be taught to swim, to row, to ride and groom a horse, so he should be taught to use the ax, the saw, the plane, and the file. Even a little skill in the use of these tools is invaluable. No one possessing manual dexterity of any kind fails to find abundant opportunity for its use.

I do not think I overestimate the value of physical strength, dexterity, and skill. It is in vain to assert the dignity of labor. Unless it has something in it besides dignity, we are not likely to be very zealous in seeking it. But skill we delight in. It is the exercise of skill which gives zest to all our games and sports, and removes the curse of Adam. There is not a person before me possessed of unusual skill, — I care not whether it be in handling the carpenter's ax or the painter's brush, in playing the organ or in shooting game, in driving horses or in sailing a boat, in making bread or in fitting a garment,—who is not conscious of a feeling of gratification and pride in consequence. Carlyle says in his Sartor Resartus‎, "Two men I honor, and no third: First, the toil-worn craftsman," etc. It is obvious that it is the craft that lie honors, and not the toil.

I therefore plead for a more extended and more systematic physical [manual] education. It is the best aid towards securing a wholesome intellectual culture, and it is the only means for making that culture of practical use. The world judges and rates us according to what we can do; and as an accomplished gymnast never loses his presence of mind, whether hanging by one foot or turning in mid-air, so a well-trained engineer is rarely at a loss. An acquaintance of mine, a young man well trained in both the theory and use of tools, and accustomed to do things, chanced to pass, in the city of New York, a gang of workmen endeavoring to move an immense iron safe. The unwieldy mass had partially slipped from their grasp, and all efforts to bring it again under control seemed to fail. Taking in the situation at a glance, my friend stepped forward and assumed the command. Clearly and without hesitation he gave his orders; promptly and willingly the men obeyed. In a moment the safe was well in hand, and expeditiously moved to its place. As the young engineer turned to go, a gentleman stopped him and said, "Young man, I will give you three thousand dollars a year if you will enter my employ and take the charge of moving our safes." Besides saying that the skill thus displayed was gained by study of the strength of materials and the mechanical powers, coupled with the actual use of tools in his own hands, I ought to add, perhaps, that the blunt offer was politely declined.

SHOP-WORK.

But the acquisition of this desirable manual skill requires workshops and tools and teachers; and, as such essentials are not in general to be had at home or at a common school, the work must be done at a polytechnic school. Hence, at the earliest possible moment, in the lowest class, students must enter the workshop. From the bench of the carpenter they should go to the lathe. Wood-turning is an art requiring great judgment and skill, and any one accomplished in it will testify to its great practical value. After wood, come brass, iron, and steel turning, fitting, and finishing; then the forge, where each should learn welding and tempering. This is the alphabet of tools. Next will come their legitimate use in the manufacture of patterns for castings, in the construction of model frames, trusses, bridges, and roofs; in the cutting of screws and nuts with threads of various pitch; and in the manufacture of spur and bevel wheels, with epicycloid and involute teeth. This shop-work should extend through the entire course of four years, varying somewhat according to the professional course selected.

Professor Woodward was the professor of mathematics and engineering who is considered the father of manual arts in America. We have an alphabet of letters that we push in schools whether the children are ready or not. We have an extreme sense of urgency about that. But if we have no alphabet of tools, what will children do with the many words they can can spell? And will they have any deeper sense of understanding?

Hinge made of hardwood dowels and brass rod.

This afternoon, I have been working in the shop, putting finishing touches on small cabinets in preparation for a show that begins in January in Little Rock. I've also begun playing with another type of wooden hinge shown in the photo above.

Make, fix and create...

disgusting and despicable...

A man or woman can lie with words, create verisimilitude capable of  deceiving a half billion fools, but a thing made is either well crafted so that all can perceive its truth and that of its maker, or poorly made, so that all can see the truth of its shameful bluster and wasteful effect.

I have nearly given up on watching American politics for the shame of it. Where are the truthful makers when we need them most? Where are those who have a well worn grip on reality? You will not find them on Wall Street or in the halls of congress. Usually when ideological principles become the main thing for political parties, you can count on real people being cut short. When we gave up on craftsmanship in American education, we gave up on the principles and values of craftsmanship as they can be applied to nearly everything else.

Fortunately there are matters we can take into our own hands. There are matters of personal integrity that can learned through the process of making simple things. Get a grip.

Make, fix and create...

today in the woodshop at CSS...

Children from Clear Spring making our annual delivery of toys.

Ian's marvelous wooden truck and example that inspired it.

Today we visited our local food bank to deliver toys that our Clear Springs School children made for holiday distribution. Then the first, second and third grade students had their last wood shop before the holiday break. Ian finished his marvelous wooden truck which was inspired by a children's toy truck loaned to the wood shop by our art teacher.

Make, fix and create...

into the not so vast scheme of things...

I have a small Norwegian box called a tine or cheese box that my great grandmother used to carry her personal precious things from Norway to the US in 1864. She was 11 years old at the time. Those familiar with Norwegian handcrafts can examine it and know that it came from the particular small town from which my mother's family came. The patterns are there in the Rosemaling. The method of work is there that reflects the culture from which it and my great grandmother arose at nearly the same time. When my mother was a small child, the bentwood box was where family photos were kept. When my grandmother died, the box came to my mother empty, the photos having been divided and shared. The box, missing parts, and having suffered indignities of repair is an object that tells a great deal about an earlier time. For instance, the cheese box belonging to my great grandmother would have been made by someone known to her. But the things in our own lives have become anonymous, ubiquitous, detached from their human makers, and thus of so much less value.

We have gone from a time in which we would have had a few precious things to lives filled with too many, and they have each declined in value. As a culture, we browse far and wide for our collection of things, but they are made no more meaningful to us as a result.

Can you see how when a person might commission work, or be on the other end as maker, relationships are woven that encompass and sustain the object made, making it of greater value? As each object becomes reflective of striving, and humanly care, it can become symbolic of so very much more... invested with human love, creative capacity,  and aspirations toward humanly perfection.

And so in the scheme of things, things once brought us together and now hold us apart, as we are often overwhelmed and left disconnected by them. To quote Wordsworth, "getting and spending have laid waste our powers." That, however, is an easy thing to fix by taking matters of making into our own hands.

Today the first, second and third grade students at the Clear Spring School will be making Christmas ornaments, and we will make our annual delivery of kid-made toys to the local food bank for holiday distribution. It seems that the ones most impressed with the toys our children have made are not the children of the poor but the older men and women who still remember the power of having made something themselves.

My great grandmother's tine is shown in the photo above.

Make, fix and create...

Liberty Tool and the importance for all to make...

There is a great message here:
The great idealistic notion from the Reagan administration that shaped our American economy is that if the rich had more money, it would trickle down to the poor as the rich engaged the poor to develop and express skill and create beauty. But if the rich have learned to have no sense of creative design, and have earned no understanding of the ways that craftsmanship lifts all boats, all persons within a culture to greatness, they spend money on themselves, not setting others to work in the making of useful beauty to thus arise in character and quality through such acts.

Sotheby's is having a record year as the rich bid up prices on antiquities and art of certified market value. Market value is the only thing so many rich people have been taught to understand. It seems to be a great time for dead craftsmen and their work. And so this is a sequel to yesterday's post on furniture making.

Children of all classes and from all income levels and particularly those in positions of entitlement need to learn the values that are acquired from working with their hands. And yet, we cannot expect a groundswell of understanding to arise for this issue without the participation of all those who know that great meaning can arise through great making. The following is from Otto Salomon:

"Persons not manually trained, generally regard the products of manual labor at less than their real value. They think it much more difficult to solve a mathematical problem than to make a table. It is not an easy thing to make a parcel-pin or a pen-holder with accuracy, and when students have done these things they will be the better able to estimate comparatively the difficulty of making a table or chair; and what perhaps is of still greater importance, they will become qualified to decide between what is good and what is bad work, and thus avoid the misfortunes which befall the ignorant and credulous through the impositions of knaves."

But the matter is even worse now than what Salomon describes. So many from all sectors of society have so little sense of what it takes to create, and have not learned that craftsmanship is the foundation of human culture. As our economy fades, those who have power and those who do not have little to do but stand idly by with twiddling thumbs.

I assume that if you are reading here you know better than that.

"When a man teaches his son no trade, it is as if he taught him highway robbery." Talmud

We have witnessed that very robbery taking place in the halls of congress and in the financial industry.

Make, fix and create...

Furniture making

I had an interview yesterday with a writer from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette newspaper on the subject of furniture making. A couple of my friends who are also furniture makers had suggested that she contact me. There aren't many professional furniture makers in the state despite our abundance of beautiful woods. She wanted to know why.

First, it can be a hard way to make a living. Homeowners can buy what they want at a price they can afford from any number of suppliers foreign and domestic. It takes plenty of imagination for most customers to walk into furniture stores and choose ready-made things that will look nice in their home. When it comes to having something made by a craftsman, it will most likely cost more money, the customer will have to wait for it, there are no exact guarantees that it will work the way they've conceived it, and most customers don't have quite the visual imagination to know how it will look. Most are so used to thinking in words, not pictures, and will have great difficulty applying their imaginations to how a custom-made piece of furniture will fit their home or office decor.

It can be hard for a craftsman to sell enough work to keep in business and get good at making furniture. I was reminded of Joe Doster, one of the furniture makers who had given my name to the reporter. For years, Joe and I sold our work at the same craft shows. He would travel with a truckload of furniture that he hoped to sell in addition to the cutting boards he made. I would always travel with a piece of furniture or two along with my boxes just to let my customers know that I could do so much more. Loading work in and out of exhibit halls is work. Keeping customers aware of our skills as furniture makers was a challenge. Even with all the shows, taking time away from our wood shops, few would know that our skills were available, and selling fine furniture at craft shows did not work for for either of us.

There is an upside. From the craftsman's perspective there are few occupations offering more potential for growth. For customers, there can be no better chance at making their home environment unique and uniquely expressive of personal relationship with fine craftsmanship and materials. Imagine having furniture made from real woods that were grown in your own state or community instead of particle board. A few still care that there is a difference.

But here we come to the crux. Commissioning work from a real live craftsman in a customer's community, fosters growth within that community. Ask a craftsman to make something unique and of great value, and you've asked that craftsman to arise to his or her highest standards, greatest creativity and to a lofty place within human culture.

Perhaps we've all had the experience of being in a major city where buildings are no longer crafted with such care as they once were and seeing beggars in the street. That is the choice we made by going cheap and neglecting craftmanship.

Comenius (1590-1652) was the first great theorist of education. He said, "We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time." In other words, the maker of beautiful and useful things busily shapes him or herself at precisely the same time. Thus the woman with paint and brush becomes the artist, the potter at the wheel, hands wet with clay, a craftsman, and in the vast scheme of humanity there are no greater values than those expressed through the arts. It is an alchemy of the truest sort... turning lead lives into the purest gold.

People gripe that they see a dearth of values in our nation and within our communities. We spend our dollars in other countries and understand that our commerce in foreign lands may lift their poor to higher standards, but we have no shared notion that the same principle works amongst our own. As we've given up on craftsmanship in our cities and towns, we've given up on the effort to arise as a culture of caring folks. We were once a nation of craftsmen. Now we are a nation of consumers, and the great pity is that there are some who do not know the difference or care that there is one.

Make, fix and create...

the debate over cursive...

They're still talking about whether or not cursive should still be taught in schools. Many states have already cut out just about all things that require the non-keyboardian use of the hands. With pressures on standardized testing, and trying to squeeze maximum value from our teaching staff, our schools have been dismasted. Politicians and administrators hack away at the rigging and let the ropes trail behind in an angry sea. As a society we are deeply engaged in a transfer of intellect from the mind and hand to our machines. The process makes a huge volume of human knowledge instantly accessible for our amusement, but leaves us unable to contribute anything real or of real value. This article in the Baltimore Sun, Writings on the wall for school cursive courses tells a bit about the ongoing story. Who needs to write with some physical semblance of skill or beauty when you can type or rely on voice recognition software to tell your tale? Who needs to sign documents when you could scan a retina, or spit to have your DNA scanned, analyzed and affixed?

We are in a process of losing fundamental human creative techniques and expressive capacities, just as when the pioneers reached the Rocky Mountains and threw precious heirlooms off the backs of their wagons to ease their climb to the top. Nowadays significant elements of human culture are being tossed off the backs of our wagons for the climb to the top of a digital divide. The hope is that as we arrive at a promised digital land, cursive and all other creative things requiring skilled hands will have no longer have use.

Today I will have an interview with a reporter from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette about furniture making. Will anyone be interested in such a thing? Can't they just live their lives as avatars swirling around among tiny screens? As avatars they can choose digital furnishings at no cost, no real wood or effort or skill required. On the other hand and at the risk of sounding crazy, I suggest we engage our fingers in exploring things that are not flat and have texture other than glass. One landscape is far richer than the other. If you are bothering to read here, I suspect you know which.

Make, fix and create...

15,015 hours in school...

K. Anders Ericsson, is a Swedish psychologist at Florida State University, who came up with the 10,000 hour rule on the attainment of mastery. The rule is understood to apply to a wide range of practices and was made popular through Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers... The rule can be applied to writing code on a computer, athletics, dance, or music, woodworking, art, and so many things that offer the opportunity to earn and express mastery. Anders Ericsson's article in the Harvard Business Review can be found here, or a pdf download here.

"Back in 1985, Benjamin Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, published a landmark book, Developing Talent in Young People, which examined the critical factors that contribute to talent. He took a deep retrospective look at the childhoods of 120 elite performers who had won international competitions or awards in fields ranging from music and the arts to mathematics and neurology. Surprisingly, Bloom’s work found no early indicators that could have predicted the virtuosos’ success. Subsequent research indicating that there is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports, and medicine has borne out his findings. The only innate differences that turn out to be significant— and they matter primarily in sports—are height and body size.

So what does correlate with success? One thing emerges very clearly from Bloom’s work: All the superb performers he investigated had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years. Later research building on Bloom’s pioneering study revealed that the amount and quality of practice were key factors in the level of expertise people achieved. Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born."

All of this presents a rather frightening scenario for the future of American culture and economy. We have no innate claim to excellence or superiority, and if we give up our inclination toward hard work and long practice we will make very little of ourselves.

Last night I began wondering how many hours children spend in school and what they learn from it. Bear with me as I do the math... Nine months with 4 weeks per month and with 3 weeks off for breaks equals 33 weeks. Thirty-three weeks times 5 days per week times 7 hours per day equals 1155 hours per year. Kindergarten through 12 grade equals 13 years which times 1155 hours equals 15,015 hours in school. Children in preschool have even more hours. Those hours are enough time to attain mastery in one thing, and half-mastery in another and yet there is not much chance of mastery of even one thing in sight.

They say that children facing employment in the next few years may have as many as 5 to 8 jobs in a 10-15 year period. What does this all say about the rewards of accomplishing difficult and demanding things that reinforce one's sense of self? Will there be opportunities to get really good at something? Even just one small thing?

What children most often learn in school is that they do not like school. And while 10,000 hours may be enough time to become world class in something, 15,015 hours could be enough to enter to make masters in boredom and mediocrity.

In our homes, we present children with wonderful technologies that entertain, and make easy. So again let's do the math. In an average day at home, each child sits in front of a TV or computer screen 3-5 hours (or more). Three hours times 365 days a year times beginning at age 3 equals 16,425-27,375 screen-time hours by the time a child reaches 18 years of age. That would be enough time to get really good at something. How about basketball or the clarinet, or wood turning... Mastery of one thing, and half-mastery of another?

1/16 in. brass stock is perfect for forming small cabinet door pulls

Yesterday we finished the filming of my DVD Building Small Cabinets which will be released in March, so now I can do all the finishing touches on the cabinets which will go in a show at the Historic Arkansas Museum starting in January. What you see in the photo above are brass pulls I'm making for a small white oak display cabinet. To bend the curves to create finger grips, I used the DuoMite bending jig shown in the photo below. Next I will need to cut these pulls to length, drill and countersink mounting holes, sand and polish the edges smooth and mortise the edges of the doors for them to fit.

The Duo-Mite bending jig is used to bend
precise curves in brass or steel stock.

After rounding the edges, I drill mounting holes.

After polishing the pulls are ready to install.

Make, fix and create...

what difference does it make???

Some of my readers may wonder what difference it makes whether human intellect first arose through the use of the hands or through man's verbal-linguistic capacity. That is the current argument going on between followers of Noam Chomsky and those who are exploring the roots of human intelligence in the use of the hands. It is actually an interesting intellectual battle which rests upon the presumed supremacy of the academic mind. If we knew more about the development of intellect, that understanding could alter our expectations as to what children should be doing in school. Is it enough that they be taught reading and math? Or should they be instructed in other things, like art, laboratory science, music and wood shop. This last sentence was in the form of a question, but one posed without a question mark, as I believe we all know what the answer should be.

If every aspect of human intellect arose through our capacity for speech, then reading ought to be enough to fill the bill. But many of the greatest minds point to the wide range of activities through which human intellect is developed and expressed. If we wanted to encourage the wide range of intellect and full development of our children's minds, our schools would be workshops humming with music, noise, self-directed developmental activities of all kinds, all well beyond the capacity of standardized testing to record.

One of the things that we find in schools is that the activities are made for one hand or the other, with the right being the preferred hand. And as the left (or right) is neglected, left untrained for much more than holding the paper in place as the dominant hand holds the pencil or pen, we are missing out on important components of brain integration that lead to human intuition, or in German, fingerspitzengefühl, which means having the appearance that all knowledge is at the tips of one's fingers. It is no coincidence that this term for the full expression of human intuition would be described in the language of the hands.

When thinking of human intelligence we rarely think of human intuition as an expression of it. German Field Marshal Rommel, the "dessert Fox" was described by as having fingerspitzengefühl as he eluded the British in North Africa, but his feat was not a matter of divine intervention but one of integration of the two hemispheres of his own brain. Through the integration of his left and right hemispheres he was able to maintain what appeared to be an extrasensory grasp of the minute details and a simultaneous sense of the whole range of battle. Of course you could say this is just woodworker's speculation, but it has been observed by others. This phenomena was what Jean Jacques Rousseau was describing when he said,

"Put a young man in a woodshop, his hands will work to the benefit of his brain, and he will become a philosopher while thinking himself only a craftsman."

And so, if you are paying attention, you will know why we need to turn our schools into workshop/laboratories, where children are making things, doing experiments, learning hands-on, playing instrumental music, each activity engaging both hands. Children may feel a powerful, intuitive capacity as they slide one finger over glass, but real fingerspitzengefühl arises when children are engaged in their learning hands-on, both hands, and with their hearts engaged also.

So, yes it does make a difference understanding how human intellect arose in the first place.

Today Gary Junken and I will finish the Building Small Cabinets DVD. We may have just a few voice-overs later to finish up and meet a February deadline and spring release.

Make, fix and create...

Back to small cabinets...

This morning Gary Junken from Taunton Press will arrive to continue filming my building Small Cabinets DVD. We will be cutting one kind of corner joint, retaking footage on another, and then getting background video on the various cabinets, and small cabinet details featured in my Building Small Cabinets book. The video work leaves very little time for other things. So read deep in the blog if you come here and find nothing new.

Six ways in which segments can be rotated for use as
tools and weapons. The stippled areas represent adhesive.

Mary Marzke sent me links to an article by Lyn Wadley on the use of adhesives to attach stone to wood in the making of shafted tools, weapons and instruments. Wadleys's work was published in Current Anthropology, and illustrates the intellect involved as early man crafted tools to enable his survival. Evidently, there was enough adhesive remaining on some crafted pieces of stone from 70,000 years ago to reformulate the means through which they were attached. This work pushes forward by 40,000 years, the earlier speculation by V.G. Childe and others that the handle came as late as 30,000 years ago.

Compound adhesives were made in southern Africa at least 70,000 years ago, where they were used to attach similarly shaped stone segments to hafts. Mental rotation, a capacity implying advanced working‐memory capacity, was required to place the segments in various positions to create novel weapons and tools. The compound glues used to fix the segments to shafts are made from disparate ingredients, using an irreversible process. The steps required for compound‐adhesive manufacture demonstrate multitasking and the use of abstraction and recursion. As is the case in recursive language, the artisan needed to hold in mind what was previously done in order to carry out what was still needed. Cognitive fluidity enabled people to do and think several things at the same time, for example, mix glue from disparate ingredients, mentally rotate segments, talk, and maintain fire temperature. Thus, there is a case for attributing advanced mental abilities to people who lived 70,000 years ago in Africa without necessarily invoking symbolic behavior.

There is no concrete evidence that man's development came as a result of language alone, but there is evidence that the making of things took a leading role in the development of man. There is a growing body of evidence that making the tools for our survival and the increased size of the human frontal lobe were parallel developments. You can find Lyn Wadley's article Compound‐Adhesive Manufacture as a Behavioral Proxy for Complex Cognition in the Middle Stone Age here. In order to understand all this and write this paper, Wadley had to make the adhesive from materials found in the natural environment and then replicate the methods for attachment, demonstrating again that you won't really learn all that much about real things by just yakking. "Her main research interest is ancient cognition and her experimental archaeology is geared towards understanding the mental architecture required for various behaviors."

In order to better understand your own mental architecture,

Make, fix and create...

The chart above was made at MIT to show the number of jobs created through the spending of 1 Billion US dollars in various economic sectors. You can see that government support for education pays off far more as an economic stimulus and essentially gives two bangs for the buck. It is kind of like how cutting firewood warms you twice. But we are far too stupid in the politics of this nation to do anything about it.

the hand, primatology and anthropology

Hand author Frank Wilson introduced me to Mary Marzke (via email) and she is one of the world's foremost authorities on the evolution of tools and adaptive use of the hands. It is an exciting connection for me. I suggested to Mary that:

"One of the things we need to be thinking about is how the hands interface physical reality in partnership with the eye. The paper (I referenced in the blog yesterday) notes that the finger tips are good at sensing texture and temperature, but not shape. The back and forth rubbing motion of fingers is used in the manipulation of tablets which offer no discernible texture. Are we ignoring other important hand senses in our and our children's engagement with reality by giving them a steady diet of digital devices? The hands and eyes work in partnership. When flat screens meet iPads and we fail to engage the hands in the sensing of weight, scale and shape, what other things are we failing to offer?

There are tests that they give students to determine IQ, asking how is this shape different or the same in comparison to other shapes. I strongly suspect that that sensitivity to shape, and ability to interpret the meaning of shaped objects is related not only on the seeing of shape, but related also to the catalog of ideas of shape that have arrived within the brain by the handling of those shapes. It would be interesting to prove it."

This idea presents some interesting research opportunities that Dr. Marzke says she will present to colleagues engaged in study with chimps.

Another thing that I shared with her that she thought would be useful for an upcoming speech was the role of kindergarten and play with kindergarten objects in the personal intellectual development of Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright.

I am hoping that Dr. Marzke can help me with a question I've been wrestling with... the development of the handle. It was suggested by V.G. Childe and others that while the making of tools goes back over 2.5 million years, the application of the handle came only 35,000 years ago, corresponding with an explosion of brain development and vastly increasing the power and range of our tools. This virtual explosion of intellect, came as man was able to use metaphor to apply the notion of the handle to an ever increasing and widening array of instruments. It may not describe a causal relationship between the hand and the development of mind, but may add evidence to the discussion of whether the explosion in brain capacity came as a result of language use, or tool usage. It also makes a difference whether we think of metaphor as a widely applied human capacity or just a word game.

"The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity." — Jacob Bronowski

In the wood shop today at Clear Spring School, first, second and third grade students will make decorative Christmas trees in preparation for the holiday season.

Make, fix and create...

hand and eye...

There is evidence linking exploration by the hands to the development of intellectual grasp of physical reality. Lederman and Katsky:

"...carried out seminal work on exploratory procedures, classifying typical hand movements into six types (lateral motion, pressure, static contact, holding, enclosure, and contour following) and characterizing each type based on factors such as compatibility with other EPs (exploratory procedures) and execution speed. Of particular interest for this study is their demonstration that the choice of EP determines the nature of the information which can be extracted about an object. For each EP, they estimated EP-to-property weightings which represent the extent to which an object property can be extracted using a given EP. For instance, lateral motion, a back-and-forth rubbing motion of the fingers over a surface, is best-suited for extracting texture, but provides little or no shape information. Enclosing objects in the hand provides information about global shape and texture, but little exact shape information. Contour-following provides access to texture and global shape, while also providing the most information about an object’s exact shape."

This paper may be a bit deep for many of my readers, but was sent to me by Dr. Frank Wilson, author of the Hand.

One of the things we need to be thinking about is how the hands interface physical reality in partnership with the eye. You will note in the above quote that the finger tips are good at sensing texture and temperature, but not shape. The back and forth rubbing motion of fingers is that which is used in the manipulation of tablets. But are we ignoring other important hand senses in our and our children's engagement with reality by giving them a steady diet of digital devices? The hands and eyes work in partnership. When flat screens meet iPads and we fail to engage the hands in the sensing of weight, scale and shape, what other things are we failing to offer?

There are tests that they give students to determine IQ, asking how is this our sensitivity to shape, and ability to interpret the meaning of shaped objects is related not only to the seeing of shape, but related also to the catalog of ideas of shape that have arrived within the brain by the handling of those shapes.

One more reason to make, fix and create...

Interesting op-ed piece in today's New York Times about the failure of sanctions-based No Child Left Behind Legislation.

wherewithal...

I have been a longtime member of the National Association of Home Workshop Writers and had served for a term as VP and then as President. I continue to serve as a member of the board. We are currently opening up a membership drive to recruit new members interested in professional level writing for the do it yourself market. I will have more information to share in the blog at a later date.

We all know that the loss of shop classes in American schools was a truly dumb idea, and those of us who write about DIY know that far better than most. Children have been introduced to technologies that make things easy for them and offer little encouragement toward development of the wherewithal to do difficult and challenging things. That's something we need to fix. As writers, it affects our industry.

Also, because DIY writing involves the hands and direct teaching of practical things, it is placed on a lower intellectual and social hierarchy than fiction and other non-fiction materials. Start an organization to promote fiction and you'll have zillions of members overnight. But write about subjects based on real experience that others can replicate in their own hands and the market shrivels in today's world where "ease of use" matters so much to everyone and children are seldom asked to do difficult things. So successful how-to writing that encourages readers to read and become engaged in making real things and to discover their own wherewithal to take on real challenges in the real world requires how-to writers to stick together and encourage each other in our work.

I was at Lux weaving studio yesterday selling my small boxes and working on a letter to promote the Eureka Springs School of the Arts. A man came in looking for a plumber. He's a skilled software engineer recently retired to a grand historic home in Eureka Springs who had never applied his hands to anything beyond the keyboard, and as he worried about how to find a plumber on a Sunday in Eureka Springs, I offered the use of my wrenches... along with the suggestion that he take time to discover the pleasure of knowing how to do something himself. He listened to my encouragement, but I could see it didn't stick. It is extremely difficult to awaken a person to their own capacities. It was obvious that he came from a social strata in which gentlemen did not do plumbing. I tried to tell him that having the wherewithal to fix things on your own time, without dependence on others is an ennobling and fulfilling endeavor. Can you imagine sitting around wringing your hands on a Sunday afternoon rather than choosing to take matters in your own hands and discover your own physical and intellectual power?

wherewithal is a very good thing.

Make, fix and create...

silence, please...

Over a year ago, I ran into a dear friend in the airport. We were each leaving on flights to different destinations. While he was leaving to take a month-long retreat in silence, I was headed off to teach a class in box making in which I would be talking a great deal and students would hang on my every word. Being good friends, we reveled in support of each others adventures.

I recently asked John if he would be willing to offer a Sunday program at our local UU Church about his experiences in silent reflection. In response he asked, how could he share the experience of silence without being silent? It is a dilemma. There are those things well beyond words, that cannot be easily expressed in language. And yes, this is related to the posts of the last couple days.

From an academic perspective, Noam Chomsky, and all, the idea is that language is the highest expression of human intellect. (That would certainly be the position an academician would take). If a matter can't be put into words, it is not of real value in the academic scheme of things. From a craftsman's view, I see other things at play. There are many things that cannot be put into words, need not be, and may be made trivial (except through poetry) by our attempting to do so. Jill Bolte Taylor's book, A Stroke of Insight describes her experience of having a stroke that robbed her of the function of the left (analytic and language) side of her brain. Being a brain researcher and watching as her left side brain function collapsed gave her extraordinary insight. Her account of her stroke is fascinating, because she describes the experience as a somewhat frightening uncontrolled entry to a state of glorious nirvana. In fact the left and right sides of the brain might provide a map for the discussion of my friend's silence if I can convince him to take part. There is a great TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor describing her experience.

When we create educational systems with only our left brains in mind and overlook the right, we create children that early educators had described as "one-sided." If you look at today's culture, you can see the results. We have this "teach to the test" view in which a subject is not learned if it is not measured and if it can't be easily measured is of no value. To our children we have offered a world in which anxiety is the norm, little comfort can be found in the making of beautiful and useful objects, and in which their failure to find happiness through meaningful service is reasonably assured.

The strategic implementation of the hands, left and right, offers an alternate model for education. To repeat Ruskin, "no lips of man" can teach those things that are of the greatest importance, but the hands can, and where the hands lead, the heart and mind follow.

One of the things that one can learn in the wood shop is silence. And it can be required in order to do the best work. Have you listened to the plane shaping an edge? Did you know that human wisdom is best expressed not through words but through silence?

To listen to today my interview today on Inside Education with Paul Preston, Click Here.My interview on the Wisdom of the Hands begins 1 hour and 5 minutes into the recording.

Make, fix and create...

The consequences...

Yesterday's blog post was about understanding the cognitive implications of craftsmanship, and of course there is much more to the subject than can be explored in a single blog post. It is a subject I return to again and again in the blog. Keep reading, and you still will not fully know that which can be best learned in your own hands.

I want to take readers in a slightly different direction this morning to explore the consequences resulting from our assumptions that hand work is not on the same level of cognitive activity as purely academic work, when in fact, purely academic work is often idly speculative, often unsupported by evidence, and may resemble the truth without being true. It creates an intellectual system in which belief and rigid adherence to dogma is regarded just as important as observable truth. It encourages the development of faulty character as we see too clearly in the financial and political cultures that have poisoned our nation...

Jean Jacques Rousseau had said,

"Put a young man in a work shop, his hands work to the development of his brain and he becomes a philosopher while thinking himself only a craftsman."

You will read in that quote a sense of humility along with the sense of inadvertent triumph over matters of intellect... You can find the same ideas about the relationship between science, philosophy and the work shop expressed in the longer quote from Charles H. Ham in yesterday's post.

Can you see the tragedy of what we've done? Instead of a nation of craftsman/philosophers, we've created a nation of consumers, debt ridden, obsessed with ideological positions, seeing no hope but that of salvation by others. Seen from another political perspective, our system of education has created an upper class isolated from reality, unaware of the essential values that craftsmanship can bestow on the character of a nation. A social and economic class unaware of its own potential and responsibility to move our nation toward greater things.

Have you visited the Yale campus? It is exquisite. It was financed by a wealthy philanthropist and intended to resemble Oxford. The stone masons were imported from Europe, and the stone was buried for two years to take on the right aged patina before being used to construct its glorious buildings intended to look just as old as the great educational institutions of the UK. Did you know that you can spend 4 years at Yale without ever gaining insight into the mason's art? ...without being drawn by your on curiosity to engage creatively with the beauty that surrounds you? Can you see that there is a wrongheadedness to our endeavors? Did you know that seeing the world from a more hand-centric view casts things in a whole new light?

"Let the youth once learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its mortar, and he has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him." --John Ruskin, "Time and Tide", 1883

But we have done none of these things.

Author of the Hand, Frank Wilson, sent me this link to an article by Ed Tenner of Yale, suggesting "that kids need laps, not apps," and pointing out the unknown potential effects of the introduction of digital devices to children. We know that screen time has all kinds of adverse effects on child development, but that does nothing to dispel the enthusiasm parents and technology companies have for selling these devices and targeting them toward underage use.

Tomorrow I will have another interview on the Inside Education. My segment will air at 5 PM Pacific Standard Time. Click the link where it says "Listen Now".

This evening I will be at Lux Weaving Studio, 21 White St. in Eureka Springs, hours 5 to 8PM.

Make, fix, and create... You will learn amazing things about materials, but also about yourself.

academics vs. craftsmanship?

My point is not to disparage, but to help establish a more leveled playing field for the arts. I was reading an article yesterday in which my blog was mentioned and it said,

"The discussion in the Netherlands about skills-oriented education versus academic, cognitive schooling reflects similar discussions elsewhere."

This quote inadvertently describes a pervasive false assumption about manual arts... that the manual arts or crafts, in comparison to academic studies are non-cognitive. I know this was not the author's intent. As well known by those who work to create useful beautiful objects, there could be nothing further from the truth.

There are some differences between academic scholars and craftsmen, but the difference is not one of cognitive engagement. Each endeavor takes intellect. The tools may be slightly different. The tools of the craftsman, each of which has evolved through many generations to embody greater intelligence, are for defining the shape, size, beauty and utility of materials. The books in a scholar's library are tools recording the thoughts of previous generations just as the tools on a carpenter's bench record the skills, thoughts and experiences of previous generations. Like a craftsman the scholar will also utilize some physical tools, like writing instruments, computers and the like. He or she uses concepts, references and analogy in place of materials in his work. His or her work exists primarily within the confines of language and published material may be the only tangible expression of his or her labors while the craftsman makes beautifully intelligent things each day to serve in the lives of others.

And then we come to the truth. This is from Charles H. Ham, 1880:

"Nothing stimulates and quickens the intellect more than the use of mechanical tools. The boy who begins to construct things is compelled at once to begin to think, deliberate, reason, and conclude. As he proceeds he is brought in contact with powerful natural forces. If he would control, direct, and apply these forces he must first master the laws by which they are governed; he must investigate the causes of the phenomena of matter, and it will be strange if from this he is not also led to a study of the phenomena of mind. At the very threshold of practical mechanics a thirst for wisdom is engendered, and the student is irresistibly impelled to investigate the mysteries of philosophy. Thus the training of the eye and hand reacts upon the brain, stimulating it to excursions into the realm of scientific discovery in search of facts to be applied in practical forms at the bench and the anvil."

The human being is constantly seeking the truth; the hand is constantly finding it.

I am preparing for a Holiday Art Show at Lux Weaving Studio on Saturday (21 White St. 5-9 PM, and I am cleaning the shop, finish room and office to prepare for a video shoot next week. I will be like a fish out of water as my hands are put to tasks other than making beautiful and useful things.

Make, fix and create...

out on a limb...

I have been reading a book about how academicians think we think. It is a heavy read for one unfamiliar with the concepts. I tend to have a more practical approach. I tend to prefer tools to concepts. Tools are used to manipulate objects; concepts to manipulate understanding and/or verisimilitude. One is the domain of the craftsman and maker and the other the domain of the professional academician even though Einstein had said, "My pencil and I are more clever than I am."

We know that a huge amount of intelligence is invested in the man-made and natural objects that surround us, and intellect is not something that resides within the brain alone. But I have started to learn that when complex concepts concerning human intelligence are addressed one must walk with care or be subjected to attack by those who make a living from their speculations. I ran across the following quote in The Way We Think, by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner:

"Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians."-- Russ Rymer.

Not quite the same blood as when one gets a slice from a sharp chisel but I do not like the sight of any blood, particularly my own.

I know that the blog has acquired many readers from around the world, and I was informed of a link to Wisdom of the Hands from Radio Netherlands Worldwide. They, like so many here in the US, have become concerned that their education is failing their kids and their whole nation by neglecting the education of the their hands. They wrote,

"The link between educating children and hands-on work is explored in depth by US woodworking teacher Doug Stowe in his blog, Wisdom of the Hands. One of his tenets is that "creativity is accomplished through the engagement of the left and right hemispheres of the human brain". Current education is increasingly focusing on the left, language-oriented, half of the brain, while ignoring the right-hemisphere-based, creative problem solving skills, Stowe says.

It is interesting that many of the early advocates of manual arts training emphasized the need to educate the "whole child." And while they did not discuss the left and right sides of the brain, they knew that something vital was missing when the hands were not engaged.

These days academic hot water awaits all those who attempt to explain things in terms of the left and right sides of the brain. There are academicians laying in wait for the unwary to mention such things. But I will trudge along and just as left or right might offer useful directions when you get to the intersection at the top of the hill, they offer concepts useful in finding our way toward better education.

In the wood shop today, I have been sanding boxes and oiling boxes as you can see in the photo above, bringing some to completion some freshly made and some that have languished on the shelves unattended for years. My object is to be able to sell some this Saturday at Lux Weaving Studio in Eureka Springs where I will join two other favorite artists in selling our work. 5-8 PM Saturday at 21 White Street. Bring your checkbook.

After using the word "languish" I wonder if you've noticed the similarity between it and the the word language? While evidently unrelated, coincidence may be telling us something...

Go ahead,  join me on a limb and explore your own true intelligence... I'll lend a saw.

Make, fix and create...