My objectives...

Origami ball by Lucy Stowe

As my regular readers will know, I've been immersed once again in a study of Kindergarten and have about a half dozen books on my reader that have been providing an insight into an earlier time in American education. In the Law of Childhood, William Nicholas Hailmann told us that Froebel had considered moving to the US at one time, finding Germany to be less open to any creative ideas on education than he presumed the new nation of the United States might be:

"It is to us a matter of self-congratulation and serious reflection that Froebel, in an article written in 1836, and discussing emigration as a mode to attain his purposes, pointed to the United States as a country offering all the conditions for the existence of genuine family life, as a country where such life is at least sought and can freely develop; and that his most prominent disciple, the Baroness Marenholtz-Bulow, adds her testimony to his when she writes: ''America, where in truth a new world is forming, which possesses all the creative power of a young state, where the individual enjoys full liberty, and no artificial restraint prevents carrying out his own designs in his own way, we look upon as the field for our richest harvest. 'Yes,' she adds, 'the United States of America offer, more than any other country upon the earth, the conditions necessary for the development of a sound, rational, national system of education, similar to the one planned by Froebel."

The US was indeed open to Froebel's ideas up to a certain point. Led by the Froebel ideal, we got Kindergartens, and Educational Sloyd as a contributor to the great experiment in manual arts training. Since that time, manual arts have been virtually erased from most schooling and Kindergarten remains in name only, and with none of the features that would have warmed Froebel's heart to have seen. This is Christmas day, a time very special for most children in the US and Europe. It's a time that parents share a focus to the best of their unique abilities to fulfill Froebel's most important precept. "Let us live for our children."

Teaching at NWA November 2013

We know that shop classes exactly like we had in the US throughout most of the last century are not coming back. Many of them had declined to the point that their original mission of imparting character and intelligence to ALL children had been forgotten. And we know that the US would never again, take on a Kindergarten revolution, because we have become more regimented than Germany of the 19th century when Froebel was considering more fertile fields for his reinvention of education. But if we keep in mind that our brains are in our hands, and that we must live for our children (not only at Christmastime), we will commence together on a highway of educational renewal. It's not magic. It's not easy. But it can happen when we each apply our hands in a creative fashion and begin to realize that we must be making things, luring our children into our creative endeavors, and empowering them to create.

“I want to live in a society where people are intoxicated with the joy of making things.” — William S. Coperthwaite • 1930-2013

I received a copy of the NWA newsletter which offers a review of my class taught in Clifton Park, NY in November. You can read the newsletter here.

The origami ball Christmas ornament is one of the rewards that you might find someday from encouraging your child in hands-on learning. My daughter has been working quietly for days in preparation for Christmas, and made a variety of ornaments to supplement those she had made from pipe cleaners in pre-school.

Merry Christmas to my regular readers and all, who might stumble upon this site.

Make, fix and create...

craftsmanship and an understanding of reality...

prototype for Froebel ball...

We are in the midst of the last making day until Xmas. I've been tied up in knots going through chapters of my new book, approving edits and revising text that needs to be made clear. I am also writing a few missing sidebars, going over materials lists, and completing and revising sketchup illustrations. Much of it is kind of fun, though not as much fun as being in the shop, and I'm grateful to have a bit of extra time for this that comes from school being closed for the holidays.

I have been reading William Heard Kilpatrick's book on Froebel. In the preface Kilpatrick notes:

"Mr. Quick, discussing Froebel in his Educational Reformers, has said with a charming frankness, 'Where I can understand him, he seems to me singularly wise,' but 'at times he goes entirely out of sight, and whether the words we hear are the expression of deep truth or have absolutely no meaning at all, I for my part am at times totally unable to determine.' Probably most students of educational theory — outside the ranks of kindergartners, at any rate — have felt Mr. Quick's dilemma. Amid much that is clearly valuable there is much that is singularly forbidding. Among the kindergartners themselves this questionable element in Froebel' s thought has produced division. One wing accepts pretty fully the whole original body of kindergarten doctrine and practice, and opposes any appreciable modification thereof; the other wing consciously rejects in greater or less degree certain parts of the original Froebelian doctrine and seeks to improve the kindergarten theory and practice by utilizing the best thought current in the rest of the educational world. The latter group honors Froebel, but looks to the future. The former with an almost religious zeal has all but developed a Froebel cult. In this general situation, it fell to the writer to conduct a critical study of Froebel with successive classes of experienced kindergarten and primary students. Naturally, opposed points of view manifested themselves with regard to many of the doctrines studied. Out of these conflicts has come this book. It is therefore critical and not historical. It makes no pretense to a complete discussion of Froebel, but confines itself mainly to those disputed points of kindergarten theory which, diversely taken, lead to diverse practice. The general aim of the book is to help spread the reform of kindergarten theory and practice. Its appeal is accordingly not only to kindergartners and to the general student of educational theory, but as well to superintendents and other directors of educational practice."

From that preface, and in an attempt to get readers to view Froebel with less devotion, Kilpatrick proceeded in the first chapter to discuss Froebel's pantheistic religious beliefs, noting how Froebel's religious expressions differ from those more commonly held by  "Christians." Frobel had come under charges of pantheism earlier as he had published works explaining the origins of his method, and had tried unsuccessfully to rebut those charges. This is a bit of what Kilpatrick found disturbing, quoted from "The Education of Man":

"In nature, in life, and in the phenomena both of nature and of life, the everlasting force of destiny is paramount. We, as Christians, call this the everlasting dispensation and guidance of Providence, and when this coincides with the expression of our inmost thought, we... acknowledge in it... the voice and the will of God' (6:23 f.). Elsewhere Froebel refers to nature in terms generally reserved exclusively for the religious attitude towards God : 'Nature... the original fount of all being and life"(5 : 36), 'rest in perfect trust upon nature,' 'faith in nature,' 'the feeling of oneness with nature' (6:16ff.). More distinctly pantheistic is the following: 'The same law rules everywhere, the one law of God, which expresses itself in thousandfold many-sidedness, but in the last analysis is one, for God is himself the law" (8:28).

One of the hazards of formal education comes when teachers or administrators use education as an authoritarian means to attempt to control the beliefs of small children. Froebel had grown up as the neglected son of a Lutheran minister, and discovered his own faith by wandering the Thuringen forest. By observing nature directly rather than by merely assimilating what is told us by others, we develop faith. And with faith, belief becomes a distraction from the accuracy of observation. Froebel's faith led him to examine the role of mothers in the education of their children and led him thence to devise a method of schooling that trusted the sensory engagement of the child to guide learning and growth through self-activity. The teacher's efforts were not to be directed toward shaping the child's beliefs, but rather to facilitate and encourage the child's creative expression.

There is a difference between religiosity and faith. Religious beliefs may require a teacher to demand something from her children. Faith allows the teacher to set up learning experiences for her pupils all the while clear in her trust that the children will draw what they need from real life, just as thousands of generations of children have done. Faith requires freedom of conscious while religion demands conformity. And creative craftsmanship, pure and simple, is a means through which children and adults can come to a better understanding of reality and find a clear basis for belief, faith and trust. Froebel had faith that given constructive learning experiences, the child would grown in harmony with family and community. That was similar to what Matti Bergström called black games and white games and the consideration that children need to engage both certainty and possibility... allowing human culture to arise within each subsequent generation. The crocheted ball at the top is a prototype made by a weaver friend in response to my curiosity concerning how to make Froebel's balls for his first gift.

With that said, I wish all a very Merry Christmas. As the northern hemisphere returns to a renewal of light and we in the north begin to emerge from the coldest and darkest days of the year, let human creativity resume for all.

Make, fix and create...

thus we see...

Woodworking kids at the North Bennet St. School circa 1900

I was conversing at a party last night with an old friend who has been a sculptor and maker and teacher of making most of his life, and we concluded that makers have a different view of things, and have a more holistic outlook, being much more likely to understand the interconnectedness of all things. Much the same can be said of Kindergarten. The following is from the Law of Childhood by William Nicholas Hailmann:

"Thus we see in Froebel's Gifts the outward appliances of a scheme of mental training, influencing, feeding the various phases of mental life, inward and outward, evenly, harmoniously, and with almost ideal directness and efficiency; leading the child in his thoughts and expressions, in his feelings and actions, in scope and intensity, to unity, to universality. These Gifts enable the child to give outward shape to whatever notion he may have formed of things; to express, not in words alone (which are so fleeting and uncertain), but in things, his ideas of things and of their relations; to reflect outwardly, to reproduce in visible shape the impressions which the world has made through the senses upon his consciousness. While his hands grow in skill, as they increase in size and strength, he has, too, better opportunities for comparing his notion of things with their corresponding outer realities, and for correcting and amplifying them. Every step in insight leads to a corresponding advance in expression, in skill; the pleasure that attends the increase of light which his play with the Gifts throws upon the world about him, arouses, fixes, strengthens his love of truth; every new success in obtaining clearness, adds to his firmness of purpose; every fresh triumph in the invention of simple forms of symmetry enhances his sense and appreciation of the beautiful; every intellectual gain reacts favorably and immediately upon a corresponding moral impulse; every new analysis is immediately followed by infinitely varied syntheses, in which the new elements of knowledge gained are combined and re-combined with each other and with previous cognitions in endless reproductions and inventions, in endless forms of utility and beauty, assimilated at once and wholly into the life of the organism.

This is the soul of Froebel's gifts: Unity in Universality, and Universality in Unity — One in All, and All in One. Take them where you may, and they comprise the world of the child, reducing it to simplest elements, and opening, at the same time, countless avenues in all directions to wider, higher thought, to wider, higher influence. Inward and outward, the limits of their influence and scope lie in infinity." The Law of Childhood and other papers,  -- William Nicholas Hailmann, 1891

Make, fix and create...

Gliedganzes

Gliedganzes was a term that Froebel combined from two German words glied meaning member and ganzes meaning whole. Readers will likely know that the advocates of progressive education talk about the education of the whole child... that education should not only be concerned with teaching a child to read and do math, but to also to become engaged as a creative member of society.

Froebel's odd word gliedganzes was devised to show simultaneous concern for both directions education must proceed at exactly the same time. Froebel's gifts were designed to illustrate this. For example, the gift number 3 consisting of a cube shaped box, containing a larger cube composed of 8 smaller ones illustrates that while each cube is complete in itself, it is also a member of a larger form, just as the child itself is a member of a larger form.

I have been reading a number of books on the subject of Kindergarten, and had originally been led on this study by the realization that Kindergarten and Educational Sloyd were partners in a larger transformational movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. Both the true meaning of Kindergarten and the purpose of manual arts training were subsequently forgotten and ignored in American education. I discovered the connection between the two when I was visiting at Otto Salomon's original teacher training academy in Sweden in 2006. I had been particularly interested in reading an early educational journal, Hand and Eye, copies of which are only available from Otto Salomon's library and the British Library in London. As I first held these journals in my hand, I discovered to my surprise that they were not only about Sloyd, but also about Kindergarten and that the two were members of a larger whole, just as one small cube in collection with others, would constitute a larger cube and fill a box, itself a part of a larger whole. The official listing in the British Library is: "Hand & Eye. A monthly journal for the promotion of Sloyd Kindergarten and all forms of manual training. Vol. 1. no. 1.-vol. 10. no. 105. Oct. 1892-April 1902."

Froebel had come to his understanding of the interconnectedness of all things through his study of rocks and minerals when he worked in the Mineralogical Museum at the University of Berlin under the supervision of noted crystalographer Christian Samuel Weiss. There, he worked with trays of minerals and crystalline forms, classifying and organizing. He wrote of this experience:

I continually proved to be true what had long been a presentiment with me, namely, that even in these so-called lifeless stones and fragments of rock, torn from their original bed, there lay germs of transforming, developing energy and activity. Amidst the diversity of forms around me, I recognized under all kinds of various modifications one law of development... And thereafter, my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein I might descry* mankind, and man's development and history... Geology and crystallography not only opened up for me a higher circle of knowledge and insight, but also showed me a higher goal for my inquiry, my speculation, and my endeavor. Nature and man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other, through all their numberless various stages of development.

This morning as I was writing these words, I was thinking about my friend Hans who had been my guide to Salomon's school, and had led my exploration into Salomon's archive. Within minutes I received an email from him offering his holiday greetings.  Physicists now say that if two atoms are introduced to each other (as Hans and I were and remain), they can then be placed at the furthest extremes of the universe and still have a "consciousness" of each other, in that what happens to one affects the other. My friend Lothar Schäfer, who writes about quantum physics says that "consciousness" is not exactly the term he would apply to this phenomenon. Perhaps "gliedganzes" would fit.

What we are missing these days in American education is an organizing principle that calls each child, each classroom, each school and each community, each state and our nation to a larger mission, and a better understanding of the interconnectedness that affects all. Call it gliedganzes if you like or can find no better term for how we are connected. When we begin to see that the activities of our hands have the power to connect us in ways that lead to transcendence, and that each child is a part of a larger whole, with a crucial mission to fulfill in service to a greater whole, we will find our feet falling on the right track.

Make, fix and create.

pretend it's 1876...

Education in the US seems to continue in a state of self-generated crisis. As one educator said, we've addressed the starving our our children by developing accurate scales in the form of standardized testing to measure their loss...whereas we should be feeding them educational opportunities that foster real growth...

Starting with the small introduction of Kindergarten through the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876, parents throughout the US became enamored with the notion of Kindergarten for their own kids. Kindergarten wasn't limited to half days for a year and only for those children ready to enter school for the first time like the "kindergarten" of today. Froebel had recognized the mother as being the child's first teacher, and Kindergarten, a paradise of childhood, a garden of learning, would take place in the life of the child over a number of years, generally from ages 3 to 8.

Manual arts enthusiasm began for some because they became aware of how children truly learn and came to a realization that we needed to extend the Kindergarten method into the upper grades.

And yet, in time, we wishy-washied all that away in American education. First, Kindergarten became shrunk in years and all about preparation to read, and we crap-canned the manual arts. We developed senseless education out of our own senselessness, whereas all the early educators had noted that education must first arise first from the senses and the sensory experiences of the child.

Yesterday my first, second and third grade students delivered our student made toys to the food bank. The workers there were very busy serving lunch to the poor, and the reception we received was rather unceremonious. One student said, "That was boring," after we had made the delivery and were ready to leave. Children learn much too easily that they are the centers of their parent's universes, and yet, they must also learn to work hard to fit in with the rest of the world. They must learn that they have work to do in the service of others. And so the child's honest comment led to a class discussion on what the student's role is, and what the role of the school is... Our own purpose is not to entertain children or to alleviate boredom, but to provide experiences that lead to understanding. The following is from the Kindergarten in a Nutshell:

Kindergarten Work Trains the Hands

And when they are developed to their fullest extent and managed as Froebel intended, what may we expect of them? you ask. There is a much-used saying in the kindergarten that development according to Froebel is threefold — that is, it includes within its purpose something for the body, something for the soul, and something for the mind. We should expect, then, that the kindergarten occupations would effect something for the physical powers of the child, and we find that they train his arms and hands and fingers so that they become deft servants of his will, and not only the right hand, you understand, but the left, too, for the idea is to make him ambidextrous. In securing these ends the mind receives development also, and the same thing is true of the eye-training, which is, of necessity, partly mental and partly physical.

But the Froebel Kindergarten is not just for the development of the powers and understanding of the child. It is also a realm for creating social understanding and responsibility as follows:

The kindergarten is most valuable to the life of today because of the social training it gives. There is great danger in isolating children and in bringing them up too exclusively in the company of grown people. They need the society of their equals as much as we who are older, and they must learn by absolute contact with their fellows the interdependence of all life, and the fact that we are members one of an other. Every exercise of the kindergarten is of a social nature, and the child is only separated from his playmates when he has transgressed the laws which teach that the pursuit of his own happiness and the enjoyment of his own liberty are dependent upon his allowing the same rights to his companions.

 So, what can we do now for American education since we seem to have screwed things up? Believe me please, that the government and corporations and the foundations created by the wealth of corporations won't be rushing in to direct the necessary changes in American education. That will come only from small, revolutionary groups of mothers and fathers willing to adopt the kindergarten ideal and take matters into their own hands.

If we were to apply the 1876 model to educational change, we would be pursuing a greater knowledge of Froebel's kindergarten and Educational Sloyd and applying what we learn to our own children... then sharing what we've learned to benefit the children in our communities and in our nation at large. We have 5 making days left before Christmas.

Make, fix and create...

how good things happen...

Kindergarten Cottage, Philadelphia 1876

Americans are fixated on a top down education reform. We have major foundations investing billions in charter schools. We have a race to the top that has gone nowhere. According to recent PISA results, education in the US has gotten worse relative to that offered in other nations. Educator Steve Nelson claims that we don't have an education problem, but have a social disease in which we've become fixated on measuring our children's performance and have become distracted from teaching the child. I say the child rather than children, because we've become so fixated on groupings and measuring abstract performance that we forget that each child is an individual and of individual concern.

Yesterday at the Silver Tea, an old friend thanked me for the ideas put forth in the Wisdom of the Hands. She's become a grandmother, and having been made aware of how the hands affect the brain, that the intelligence of the hands requires nourishment, she has also been made aware of the gift that she can give to her own grandchildren, insuring their greater success and that of our nation and of our communities at the same time. Arranging hands-on learning opportunities for her grandchildren has become an important thing in her own life.

I've written before in the blog about  the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition and how it brought three important things to American education. The manual arts movement came to the attention of US educators through a vast display of the Russian system of manual training and through a much smaller exhibit of Educational Sloyd. But one of the most cherished exhibits was a  “Kindergarten Cottage” with an actual kindergarten classroom set up by the Froebel Society of Boston in which a trained teacher, Ruth Burritt, taught orphans 3 days per week. Burritt explained the method to thousands of visitors as the children followed “a typical kindergarten routine of playing, singing, movement games and manipulating Froebel’s gifts.” As described by Nina C. Vandewalker: “The enclosure for visitors was always crowded, many of the onlookers being hewers of wood and drawers of water who were attracted by the sweet singing and spellbound by the lovely spectacle.”

Kindergarten took root in America due to the enchantment of mothers, fathers, grandmothers and whole communities with loveliness  and individualized sensibility as an alternative to the dismal circumstances then present in American education. We are ready for a new revolution... one in which small groups of mothers, grandmothers, moms and dads take a few things back from administrators and politicians and restore loveliness to learning for their own children.

We have only 6 making days before Christmas... Gifts that require the full exercise of makefulness are best. We know now that good things in American education won't happen because of the top down exercise of power, but will come when folks grasp the power we have in our own hands to make things better for each individual child. Today, the Clear Spring School lower elementary will deliver our hand made toy cars to the local food bank for holiday distribution.

Make, fix and create...

Allowing the child's growth to lead

I hope that my readings of Kindergarten are not boring to my readers from the woodworking world. It may help those to remember that manual arts was first intended by some to be a continuation of a kindergarten method of learning through play. My own investigation of manual arts education began with my realization that everything I did in my own wood shop was intimately bound into every other facet of my modern life, and that woodworking offered the ideal way for students to come to a better hands-on expression of learning in a variety of subjects. Froebel in a similar fashion had seen subjects as being integrated and interconnected, whereas we send kids off to study discrete, isolated subjects without pausing to consider how the child will integrate the subjects into the fabric of their own understanding.

"No new subject of instruction should come to the scholar, of which he does not at least conjecture that it is grounded in the former subject, and how it is so grounded as its application shows, and concerning which he does not, how ever dimly, feel it to be a need of the human spirit." Friedrich Froebel.

Yesterday in the wood shop, my lower elementary school and middle school students worked on toys to be given to the food bank for holiday distribution. In the Republic of Childhood in reference to Froebel's third gift it states:

"A child is far less interested in that which is given him complete than in that which needs something from him to make it perfect. He loves to employ all his energies in conceiving and constructing forms; the less you do for him the better he enjoys it, if he has been trained to independence."

In the footnotes, it continues:

"Probably the chief wish of children is to do things for themselves, instead of to have things done for them. They would gladly live in a Paradise of the Home-made. For example, when we read how the 'prentices of London used to skate on sharp bones of animals, which they bound about their feet, we also wished, at least, to try that plan, rather than to wear skates bought in shops."--Andrew Lang

"Complete toys hinder the activity of children, encourage laziness and thoughtlessness, and do them more harm than can be told. The active tendency in them turns to the distortion of what is complete, and so becomes destructive."

"Any fusing together of lessons, work, and play, is possible only when the objects with which the child plays allow room for independent mental and bodily activity, i. e., when they are not themselves complete in the child's hand. Had man found every thing in the world fixed and prepared for use ; had all means of culture, of satisfaction for the spiritual and material wants of his nature, been ready to his hand, there would have been no development, no civilization of the human race."

So, this Xmas if you wish to give gifts, give those things that are incomplete without the child's complete engagement of his or her own imagination. If you are a woodworker, plan some time to be together with your child or grandchild in the shop.

Make, fix and create.

the occupation of making gifts...

While I'm on the subject of Froebel's gifts and occupations, we've come to the point in which the idea of a gift is that it is something to be bought in a store, and not a thing that we make for each other expressing love and personal intelligence.

In reading about Kindergarten I ran across this quote from Édouard Séguin in a book on Kindergarten

"As soon as we, young or old, have taken to the habit of asking the book for what it is in our power to learn from personal observation, we dismiss our organs of perception and comprehension from their righteous charge, and cover the emptiness of our own minds with the patchwork of others." --Édouard Séguin

Séguin's methods of work with the developmentally disabled had been an inspiration to Maria Montessori and helped guide  the development of the Montessori Method of education. There is certainly nothing new to be found here in this blog. I am simply attempting to remind parents, teachers and woodworkers of what we've always known if we've taken time to observe and have learned to trust our own observations. Comenius had said:

"Instruction must begin with actual inspection, not with verbal descriptions of things. From such inspection it is that certain knowledge comes. What is actually seen remains faster in the memory than description or enumeration a hundred times as often repeated."

Pestalozzi had said:

"Observation is the absolute basis of all know ledge. The first object, then, in education, must be to lead the child to observe with accuracy; the second, to express with correctness the re sults of his observation."

But we choose instead to cripple our children by giving them stuff that stifles their own imaginations and creative capacities.

Today the students at Clear Spring School will finish our toy making project in which we make toys cars and trucks to be given to children who visit our local food bank.

Make, fix and create.

gifts and occupations...

I had written before about Froebel's "gifts" and "occupations" and realize that I'd not come to a full understanding of what was meant by the terms. This is a confusion that comes in part from the marketing of Froebel's gifts, the fact that the gifts were always in some new stage of development, and many of the "occupations" were at some point packaged to be sold as "gifts." For instance the occupation "sticks and peas" was packaged and sold by Milton Bradley as the 19th gift. The following is from Kindergarten in a Nutshell, 1899:

Relation of the Occupations to the Gifts

"It will be seen, as soon as we begin to study the occupations, that they are closely related to the gifts, using much the same materials, illustrating the same progression (although in the opposite direction) from point to line, line to plane, and plane to solid, laying the same stress upon relations of form and number, cultivating some of the same virtues, and giving the same wide opportunities for individual work or invention. Still there are marked differences between them, prominent among which is that the gift material undergoes no essential change when used, while change is the first requisite in dealing with the occupations. We may take the blocks apart and employ them as we like, but at the close of the play they are always returned to the original shape; in the occupation of folding, on the other hand, we begin to modify the square, and to bend it into something else as soon as we take it in our hands. Another marked point of difference is that the ideas received through the gifts are commonly worked out through the occupations — that is, impression in the one becomes expression in the other."

These occupations were based on the kinds of craft projects and handwork pastimes Froebel had seen as traditional in a German home. They included paper folding, weaving with paper, strings and sticks, punching holes to create patterns, braiding, and sticks and peas. The occupations were arranged in order developmentally and were offered concurrently with the child's exploration of the gifts, those educational objects that remained essentially unchanged through use. The gifts were permanent forms used to explore temporal relationships and arrangements of the elements of those forms. The occupations used materials to create more permanent and lasting forms. The gifts were to act upon the child's understanding of the world, and the occupations were the child's expression in return. That small part I had gotten right in my earlier understanding.

It is interesting that some highly educated folks can present such excellence in their recitation of information, and be so persuasive in their arguments and be so lacking in truth in their positions.

"As soon as we, young or old, have taken to the habit of asking the book for what it is in our power to learn from personal observation, we dismiss our organs of perception and comprehension from their righteous charge, and cover the emptiness of our own minds with the patchwork of others." --Édouard Séguin

"Without an accurate acquaintance with the visible and tangible properties of things, our conceptions must be erroneous, our inferences fallacious, and our operations unsuccessful." --Herbert Spencer

"The education of the senses neglected, all after-education partakes of a drowsiness, a haziness, an insufficiency, which is impossible to cure." --Lord Francis Bacon

Today at Clear Spring School my high school students will begin a class on 3-D design, based on my classes with adult students.

Make, fix and create...

Xmas gifts that give to a child's development...

We have only 9 making days left until the Christmas holiday, so the town of Eureka Springs was full of folks yesterday, doing Xmas shopping. My small art show at Lux Weaving Studio was attended mainly by friends who didn't need much in the way of boxes.

I realize that many people these days don't have much time for making things. Shopping at malls for imported objects has become a tradition quite unlike the more romantic ideal of secretly crafting beautiful and useful objects to give to family and friends. The following is from Kindergarten in a Nutshell (1899):

"WHAT SHALL WE MAKE?

"Do you remember, when you were a child, the pastimes you delighted in? Do you remember making sand-pies, pricking holes in paper, stringing seeds and flowers and nuts, plaiting book-marks and May baskets, folding pussy-cat stairs, playing cat's cradle, drawing pictures with slate and lead pencil, cutting out figures, sewing on stray bits of cloth with your thread tied into your needle? Do you remember all these things, and, as you read them over, do they not recall to you happy summer mornings out of doors, busy rainy days by mother's side, and bright, firelit evenings when you watched in delighted admiration father's skilful fingers as he fashioned stars and rosettes, and paper caps and fly traps, and boats that would sail?"

These things may sound foreign to you. ( I hope not!) If you must buy things let those things be tools and materials through which we can renew our interest in our own creative capacities.

Here are a few off the top of my head ideas for creative gifts that give the child (or adult) creative capacity.

Delta Twine has netting needles and supplies for making your own nets. A child could be kept busy for months on this one. He or she would learn a few things, develop a huge level of confidence and never shy from simple things like tying shoes. The nets could be used to catch aquatic life and small game for study, and might lead your child into a passion for the outdoors. Froebel did this with his students.

Anything from the Lee Valley catalog (for children or adults) would lead to some form of deeper, more fertile engagement whether in the wood shop or garden.

Shop for tools of learning... craft kits, blocks, rope, and the like. Can you imagine what an 8 year old boy could do with a hundred foot hank of 1/2 in rope? He might learn how to tie knots, climb trees, and develop in all kinds of unexpected ways. Larger than normal ropes make it easier for the child to observe as various knots are learned and tied.

Knitting supplies, pocket knives, hammers, saws, chunks of wood (better than coal) are all things that a modern kid should find meaningful if left in a stocking. These things also invite parental participation and engagement.

Am I kidding? Parents are lined up at Walmart to buy xboxes. I must be dreaming of a better time.

Make, fix and create...

the thread game...

The Prisoner.. can you get loose?

Before children had iPads, laptops, smart phones and other such devices to amuse themselves, they took pleasure in other things. While many different sources list Kindergarten gifts in different orders and the lists vary, Maria Kraus-Boelte's 1893 book, THE KINDERGARTEN GUIDE: AN ILLUSTRATED HAND-BOOK, DESIGNED FOR THE SELF-INSTRUCTION OF KINDERGARTNERS, MOTHERS, AND NURSES offers the thread game as gift number 12. With gift number 12 activities were shown for one child or more using simple pieces of string or thread. She notes:

"...children always must have their fingers busy. Activity is the law of childhood and of nature; without it even the smallest weed could not grow! This natural activity of children is manifested in countless ways. No person is born lazy. A child actively and correctly trained, will not only retain its natural activity and energy, but, to a certain extent, use them to the best advantage. Many things which we learned in our childhood, we may since have forgotten; though there will always be some things which we retain and remember as clearly as ever, just as if they were printed with golden letters in our memory — recalling ever so many happy hours spent in innocent amusement with those we loved. The simple amusement of the Thread-Game answers so well to the child's natural inclination to constant activity that we may often find it in the houses of the poor as well as in those of the rich."

These days, schooling (in too many cases) is where the kids sit still and the teachers perform. In addition to finger games, the thread game offered exploration of knots, and while not being able to tie shoes may be an embarrassment for some children and parents, it is becoming more common as children have so little time to play with string.

But knots are fun and at one time Froebel had his students making nets to capture fish and small prey, and then using that activity to enhance their understanding of nature. We, on the other hand, put powerful technological devices in the hands our our children that leave them out of touch. As an example of how stupid our consumer culture has become, check this out: Fisher-Price Newborn-to-Toddler Apptivity™ Seat for iPad® device. It should be regarded as criminal for a corporation to lure young parents into such stupidity leading to the neglect of their child's real learning needs.

Today, I will be working on edits and may not make it to the shop at all unless I am very lucky. Tonight I'll be at Lux Weaving Studio selling boxes to Christmas shoppers.

Make, fix and create...

yurts...

Bill Coperthwaite with students of Clear Spring School, 2002

Each year Bill Coperthwaite would make calendars as a fundraising project for his Yurt Foundation. They were illustrated with his own pen and ink renderings of yurt designs, and contained meaningful quotations relevant to a simple, intentional life.

This year, I sent in my check about a week or so before Bill was involved in his fatal car crash, so I was not sure it would arrive. It did today. My address on the envelope and his return address were inscribed in his own hand, and the post-it note inside wished me well. But the envelope also included an obituary note, telling me it was posted by friends.

It was such a sweet and sad thing to get this calendar in today's mail. I will look at it each month and cherish the threads of friendship that bring those of like mind into the company of each other. The quote for February from William Ellery Channing, famous Unitarian minister is as follows:

My Symphony

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to the stars and the birds, to babes and sages, with an open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; in a word to let the spiritual unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. -- Channing

I cannot think of a more fitting turn of phrase than these words to summarize the ambitions of a man who lived life to the full, and yet will be missed.

Map of the flow inside the middle brain

You might like this article describing how the brain likes surprises. Neuroscience is busily mapping the brain, learning about the relationship between its various parts. Much of this study can illuminate our understanding of how the hands engage the mind, and bring the whole body to attention in learning. If you were to observe a classroom full of kids and measure them on a scale used to measure human depression, both when the teacher is present, and when the teacher steps out of the room for a few minutes, you might see the difference. This is not to suggest that kids be left on their own, but that they should be offered learning opportunities in schools and not depression. You might be interested in the term salience, or saliency which has to do with noting when things are markedly different from normal, thus eliciting a state of surprise and wakefulness, in the Striatum and Nucleus Accumben. Educational Psychologist Jerome Bruner called this state, in which the whole body is awakened to a state of learning, "Effective Surprise." It helps to explain why doing the exact same thing over and over again doesn't exactly constitute real learning.

Make, fix and create...

blocks are the best toys ever...

An article on NPR claims that blocks are the best toys ever.That's the truth, but how are they to be used? In the US, blocks are given to kids so that they can quietly amuse themselves without being a nuisance while Mom and Dad do stuff. But Froebel had much deeper learning in mind. He had begun making blocks for student use as early as 1817 when he and associates founded a school at Keilhau. According to the Paradise of Childhood,

"The beginnings of the school at Keilhau were very humble. The teachers, Froebel and Middendorf, during the summer of 1817, lived in a wretched little hut with neither door, flooring or stove, while Froebel was building a schoolhouse. The quarters assigned him had formerly served as a place for keeping hens. In July (Heinrich)Langethal graduated from the University at Berlin with the highest honors and in September he visited Keilhau to see his old comrades and take his brother to Silesia, where he had an engagement as tutor to the young nobility. Freobel received him with the utmost cordiality and the sight of the robust, merry boys who were lying on the floor that evening building forts and castles with the wooden blocks which Froebel had made for them, according to his own plan, excited the keenest interest. He had come to take his brother away; but when he saw him among other happy companions of his own age complete the finest structure of all, a Gothic Cathedral, it seemed almost wrong to tear the child from this circle. The result of this visit was that Langethal decided to stay at Keilhau with his brother, so that there might be a trio of teachers, and a great gain he was to the institution where his life work was done."

There was a long developmental process between 1817, when Froeblel's blocks were discovered in use to such effect at Keihau, and Kindergarten was introduced to the world. But any parent who has given enough blocks or legos to his or her child to allow for creative expression will know that they can have profound effect.

We have only a few making days until Christmas, and I'll agree that blocks are the best toys ever. But, unless you are buying for babies, avoid those that are cubes and have letters. Blocks are not for spelling. The best ones leave a bit more to the imagination. Today I have meetings, am attending to edits and photographs for the book, and will spend some time in the wood shop making a large cherry box.

Make, fix, and create...

time release...

I have another day without school due to snow, but fortunately, I have a long list of things to do in the wood shop to keep me occupied. I've been working on my review of Peter Korn's book, Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: the Education of a Craftsman, and the editor for British Woodworking asked me for my own opinion of why we make things and why it matters.

Peter Korn describes the process of making things as a physiological response that has effect over time in that it can be transferred like a virus among us. Psychologist Kelly Lambert, PH.D suggests that there are physiological responses on the level of neurohormones that provide the sense of engagement that Mihaly Csikszentmihaly described as flow in his groundbreaking book, Flow. As one is steadily engaged in a physiological process that involves a high degree of attention, the body secretes a steady time-release dose of neurohormones that alter the brain's chemistry to induce a form of pleasurable experience. Dr. Lambert has described this process as "effort driven rewards." The interesting thing is that this mechanism can lead one on into higher forms of conscious engagement requiring greater levels of craftsmanship. The mind/body doesn't gain the same level of pleasure from doing things ad nauseam or to the point that little or no attention is required.

So pick up a tool and try it. You will first need a goal to accomplish. These feelings of creativity do not arise in empty exercises. But with a goal in mind, a knife in hand, and a piece of wood to whittle or shape in some new and useful form of beauty, you can direct the flow of a time-released dosage of mind-altering pleasurable neurohormones that can actually transform your life... one knife stroke, and one wood chip at a time. Then when the pattern of neurohormone response has been established and while it is still fresh in the hand/mind/body, just picking up your finished work, will re-engage the secretion of these same neurohormones that made you feel so fine during the making of such a beautiful and useful thing. That will remind you to go back and make something offering greater  challenge and more useful beauty.

Make, fix and create...

art of Onfim...

Onfim as warrior in battle on horseback

Blog reader Jim sent links to pages about Onfim's drawings which were discovered in Russia in the 1950's inscribed on birch bark. These medieval  drawings from the 12th century show his family and friends, scenes of battle as witnessed or imagined by a 7 year old boy. We know his name, as he had been practicing his letters before his wandering mind led him into his artistic expression. The drawing above shows Onfim on a horse in battle. He's written his name above his figure  so we can see how art has always been used by children to imagine and plan their own futures and come to an understanding of their own place in life.

Froebel recognized that art, as expressed by the play with blocks, and other Kindergarten gifts, including drawing had three functions, addressing life, knowledge and beauty. Pogressive education was to develop the whole child. These days, American schooling is aimed toward developing that intelligence that can be most easily measured through the use of standardized tests. Just as administrators and politicians failed to understand the full depth and breadth of what was learned by students in wood shops, they've also failed to understand the full depth and breadth of what well trained teachers can do if restraints are cut free and children are engaged in the arts.

Onfim's Dad and Mom

The blind assumption among some is that teachers are of no greater importance than the checkout clerks at Walmart. Under that blind assumption teachers could be replaced by scanners programmed to measure the ins and outs of learning. But what about art? The whole child is not expressed in words alone. And a picture is worth a thousand of them.

These scraps of birchbark (there are hundreds of them) were preserved for hundreds of years in mud, the oxygen free ideal medium to prevent decay of organic materials.

Don't you just love Onfim's  illustrations of hands? Some have many more fingers than normal, and the hands are outsized, showing their huge significance in daily life. Why would Onfim's father 13 fingers and his mother only 6? Thanks, Jim, for the links.

Make, fix and create...

craftsmanship and the moral development of children...

In Kindergarten, the children were to build with blocks, but not knock down. When changing forms they were to move and manipulate one form into another without exercising their destructive impulses. The purpose was to give children the opportunity to develop their own creativity, not their destructive force. The following is from the Paradise of Childhood written by Edward Weibe and published by Milton Bradley, concerning gift number 7, a series of flat tablets with which the child could create patterns of life, knowledge and beauty.

"Although to some grown persons it may appear as if the images produced do not bear much resemblance to what they are intended to represent, it should be remembered that in most case, the children themselves have given the names to the representations. Instructive conversations should also prevent this drawing with planes as it were, from being a mere mechanical pastime; the entertaining, living word must infuse soul into the activity of the had and its creations each representation, then, will speak to the child and each object in the world of nature and art will have a story to tell to the child in a language for which he will be well prepared.

"We need not indicate how these conversations should be carried on, or what they should contain. Who would not think in connection with the pigeon-house, of the beautiful white birds themselves, and the nest they build; the white eggs they lay, the tender young pigeons coming form them, and the care with which the old ones treat the young one, until they are able to take care of themselves? An application of these relations to those between parents and children, and, perhaps those between God and man, who, as His children enjoy His kindness and love every moment of their lives, may be made, according to circumstances--all depending on the development of the children. However, care should always be taken not to present to them, what might be called abstract morals which the young mind is unable to grasp, and which, if thus forced upon it cannot fail to be injurious to moral development. The aim of all education should be love of the good, beautiful, noble and sublime; but nothing is more apt to kill this very love, ere it is born, than the monotony of dry dull preaching of morals to young children. Words not so much as deeds--actual experiences in the life of the child, are its most natural teachers in this important branch of education."

People tend to think that morality is a thing best taught by preaching at kids and by telling them what to do rather than by trusting the inherent nature of children to actively lead them to an understanding of their relationships and responsibilities to family and community. Kindergarten teachers were thus warned not to use their positions of power to preach at kids. Kindergarten and craftsmanship have this in common. When we are given creative tools, we learn of our creative responsibilities. We come to an understanding of ourselves as creative force. That force is measured directly by our abilities to create useful beauty in service to family and community. Kindergarten and the Educational Sloyd wood shop were intended as places in which children would develop moral character, intelligence and a sense of beauty.

I have been going through my second round of edits for my new book and there will likely be a third as we work to find mistakes and clarify text.  School is out today because of the weekend snow storm that left road icebound and dangerous. Rural roads in particular are hazardous in our mountainous terrain.

Make, fix and create...

certainty vs. possibility...

As the educational policy makers in the US are faced with yet another slap in the face by the 2012 PISA study, we are granted yet again, an opportunity to look at what we are doing in American education and to think about what we are doing to kids. Whereas the Kindergarten model focused on building the child's sense of relationship to his or her community, the child's capacity for intellectual engagement, and the child's sense of beauty and creativity, American educational policy attempts to control the input and retention of particular forms of knowledge in the hopes that they can be measured. So far, not so good. It's not working.

The Finnish brain researcher, Matti Bergström "concentrates on the child’s inner life and its – as we see it – chaotic ’possibility space’. Professor Bergström maintains that it is not only a question of ’white games.' The white games are our pedagogical efforts trying to bring up children in our own image. But there must also be room for the ’black games’ where children test themselves and the world around them. They must be given space. At a recent conference, Matti Bergström posed the question: do children need a knowledge lift? His answer was no, they need a chaos lift. We must allow children space and opportunity for the black games which are created in the unorganized and unsupervised meeting with other children.

"Very briefly, Matti Bergström’s reasoning can be boiled down to this: The core of culture is art. The core of art is creativity. The core of creativity is possibility. The core of possibility is play. The core of play is chaos. Therefore all culture is based on chaos. More than ever before do we wish to encourage each individual’s creativity and culture-creating ability. The skills of the agrarian and industrial society have long since become obsolete."

Finland, too, this year got a small slap in the face. Instead of leading the world in nearly all subjects as has been in the past, Finland's scores dropped to 5th and 6th in reading and math, while Shanghai, China leads the world as the top scoring economy (not nation). Of course, the whole thing would be described by Bergström as the white game in which one generation tries to enforce its standards, methods, values and thoughts upon another instead of allowing them to emerge through engagement in the real world. Can it be that when children do poorly in school that they, for various reasons are beginning to reject the values and methods that the school represents?

I will again repeat the basic premises of Educational Sloyd. As absurrd as this might sound, modern educators could learn a few things from progressive education from the 19th century.

1. Start with the interests of the child.
2. Move from the known to the unknown.
3. Move from the easy to the more difficult.
4. Move from the simple to the more complex.
5. Use the concrete to illustrate the abstract.

If education is not working for any particular child, a classroom, a school, a community or a nation of children, there are two directions to look. More than likely, it has lost the interest of the child, and failed to use concrete engagement of the child to sustain interest. This is where art, creativity, and physical engagement in learning come into the equation. While educators are seeking certainty to prove themselves and their methods, children are looking for possibilities. Those possibilities are available in the arts.

Recent research about how art makes you smart was conducted at our own Crystal Bridges Museum in Northwest Arkansas and described in the New York Times. Art Makes You Smart. 

Make, fix and create...

play in the snow...

Tonight I have an art show at Lux Weaving Studio on White St. Even with traffic moving slowly, there will be walkers about. We have 8 inches on the ground, and I had a day of pushing snow off the long drive with the tractor, quiet work at the "drawing board," using sketchup, and corresponding with editors and friends.

I had the unlikely opportunity to come to the rescue of a police car in the afternoon. When I arrived with my tractor at the end of my long road where it hits the highway, I found a half dozen vehicles parked including the fire chief, a tow truck, the police chief's car, a city works truck loaded with gravel and with the blade mounted on front. The drivers were standing there scratching their heads. A 4-wheel-drive police car had tried to make a run up ice-packed Grand Avenue and got stuck in the middle of the road half way up the long hill.

There was never a street in the world as misnamed as our "Grand." First, it's not an avenue, and secondly, its not grand.

In any case, the police car could not go forward up the ice, and it could not back safely down without losing control and possibly going off the side of a 30 ft. embankment. The tow truck could not get in range to be of any use. The gravel truck could not get up the hill, or down from the other side to be of any help because the police car was smack dab in the middle of the road.

They asked, "could you take your tractor up the hill and use your box blade to clear the ice?" Of course. I backed my tractor up the hill to the patrol car, lowered both the box blade and front end loader and scraped ice all the way down the hill. A second pass cleared enough snow and ice so that the patrol car could safely pass down. It took less than 5 minutes to do the good deed. It felt good to be able to come to the rescue, and of a police car, no less. It might seem silly to some that a person can take pleasure in being of use to someone else. But that pleasure is the simple glue that binds the threads of humanity into a meaningful form. It is associated with feel good neurohormones that can warm you even on the coldest day. As the police car backed safely down, I gave a two fingered gloved salute and went back to scooping snow off my road.

In our struggle against SWEPCO's unwanted power line, it seems that Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is our newest friend. It protects valuable historic properties from wanton destruction by governmental agencies or by corporations if what they plan to do involves permits to cross government lands or waterways. It seems that if the US Army Corp of Engineers does its job properly, it must be in compliance with Section 106, and cannot under any but the most dire circumstances allow the power line to be put in where it would damage the Trail of Tears or imperil the future of the National Battlefield Park at Pea Ridge. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation asks that we contact agencies to demand that Section 106 be enforced. Indeed, we will.

My art show will be at Lux Weaving Studio from 4 to 9 PM, 18 White St. Eureka Springs, AR.

Make, fix, and create...

occupations and exercises...

When you understand the fact that Educational Sloyd was modeled on Froebel's Kindergarten and intended as a means to build upon the Kindergarten method some of the parts of it make perfect sense... particularly as you begin to understand Kindergarten at a deeper level. For example, the Kindergarten gifts carried three distinct areas of the child's engagement... Forms of Life, forms of Knowledge, and forms of Beauty.

Forms of life, were objects constructed from Kindergarten tools that expressed the child's relationship with family and community. Forms of Knowledge were arrangements of objects that expressed the child's growing understanding of geometry, structure and math. Forms of beauty... what can one say? They were intended to reinforce the child's capacity to discover beauty in life, in learning, and in the universe, and to partake in the creation of that beauty.

In Educational Sloyd you can see how the Kindergarten learning model was applied in the development of models through which children would develop skill. The models were intended to be useful to the child and to real life processes within his or her community. The models were arranged to offer exercises that gradually and incrementally expanded the child's level of knowledge and skill. And of course the models themselves and the child's making of them were intended to instill a sense of the beauty of form.

Today in Northwest Arkansas, we have about 5 inches of snow with more to come during the day. This is our first winter storm of the year, and the forest outside is lovely. After a bit, I'll get in warm coveralls, and use the tractor to clear our long drive. I love those first steps in deep snow when the world appears fresh, new and untrodden. It's like taking a piece of rough lumber and making something beautiful from it, though oddly in reverse.

In the use of Kindergarten blocks (gifts 3, 4, 5, and 6), children were told to make, not knock down and destroy, and when the blocks were to be put away, they were to be neatly stacked as larger cubes, would then have the empty box placed over them, be slid as a cube inside the box carefully off the Kindergarten table onto the lid, be turned right side up and put neatly away for future use. The simple ritual meant that each time the blocks were gotten out for learning and play, they presented a perfect cube... a form beautiful and pristine. Each child would be ceremonially involved in the richness of real life, as through taking their first steps in freshly fallen snow.

Make, fix and create...

kind of a buzz...

I've been in kind of an electric buzz this afternoon due to a letter that was forwarded to me from the Omaha, NB office of the National Parks Service. It was written to inform the Arkansas Public Service Commission of their complete disagreement with the Staff's Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law concerning the power line proposed by SWEPCO that was intended to create extra transmission profits for the utility company by destroying scenic beauty in Northwest Arkansas. My readers may remember that AEP/SWEPCO had proposed one of their alternate routes to pass within 75 feet of my deck, and within clear view from historic Spring St. in Eureka Springs. The proposal was inept. The proposal was injudicious. The idea was dead wrong, and the folks in my community rose up against it... a thing unheard of in Arkansas, a state in which power companies have always gotten whatever they want.

Fortunately, and as was expected, the National Parks Service, acting in defense of the National Battlefield Park at Pea Ridge, found the utility company's Environmental Impact Statement to be deeply flawed. They also found the findings of the public service commission's engineers and attorneys in approval of the project to be reprehensible.

Whether or not the Arkansas Public Service Commission will deny the application, or whether or not AEP/SWEPCO will do the reasonable thing and withdraw their application is yet to be seen. But it seems it might be difficult for them to move forward against the National Parks Service and the US Army Corp of Engineers which would have to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act in their approval of any river crossings by the power company.

It seems that it is OK for folks to lie, cheat, steal to get what they want, particularly if they are associated with a powerful corporation. But sometimes, small folks have fierce friends in high places.

I want to thank my friends at the Arkansas Department of Heritage for forwarding this important letter. It may offer some distinct relief.

So far our snow and ice have not been accompanied by the ice that brings down trees and power lines. In the small part of Northwest Arkansas, we are breathing a sigh of relief on two fronts.

Make, fix and create...

blocks and math... not just for play.

The following is from the Quarter Century Edition of the Paradise of Childhood and concerns Froebel's Fifth Gift.

"The representation of the forms of knowledge, to which the Fifth gift offers opportunity, is of great advantage for the development of the child. To superficial observers, it is true, it may appear as if Froebel not only ascribed too much importance to the mathematical element to the disadvantage of others, but that mathematics necessarily require a greater maturity of understanding than could be found with children of the Kindergarten age. But who thinks of introducing mathematics as a science? Many a child, five or six years of age, has heard that the moon revolves around the earth, that a locomotive is propelled by steam, and that lightning is the effect of electricity. These astronomical, dynamic, and physical facts have been presented to him as mathematical facts are presented to his observation in Froebel's gifts. Most assuredly it would be folly, if one would introduce in the Kindergarten, mathematical problems in the usual abstract manner. In the Kindergarten, the child beholds the bodily representation of an expressed truth, recognizes the same, receives it without difficulty, without overtaxing its developing mind in any manner whatsoever. Whatever would be difficult for the child to derive from the mere word, nay, which might under certain circumstances be hurtful to the young mind, is taught naturally and in an easy manner by the forms of knowledge, which thus become the best means of exercising the child''s power of observation, reasoning and judging. Beware of all problems and abstractions The child builds, forms, sees, observes, compares and then expresses the truth it has ascertained. By repetition, these truths, acquired by the observation of facts, become the child's mental property, and this is not to be done hurriedly, but during the last two years in the Kindergarten and afterwards in the Primary Department."

I know this is a long thing to read without illustration, so I scanned the arrangement of blocks above from Paradise of Childhood. The complexity of the arrangement of blocks from the Fifth Gift is certainly beyond the way mathematics is usually presented, and at 5 and 6 years of age, far earlier than any complex math is now presented to kids.

These days, Froebel's Kindergarten, just like Educational Sloyd, has nearly completely disappeared from the educational landscape. Now we have Kindergarten in name only, and remote statistical examination of mathematical groupings of kids has superseded actual observation and direct understanding of the individual child. Kindergarten has become the place where reading and readiness to read have become the whole enchilada, leaving the child and our future two tacos short. Play with blocks in a Froebel Kindergarten was not just play. It was a way of developing the whole child and laying the clear path to his or her success in math and in life.

By the time my mother had become educated as a Kindergarten teacher,  the breadth and scope of Kindergarten had been shrunk to a single year, and the tools of Froebel's Kindergarten had been forgotten.  In the meantime, PISA results released just released show American students holding steady in the middle of the pack. All the attention that has been given to American education of late through standardized testing has done nothing to help us move forward. As reported by Claudio Sanchez on NPR, the results of this year's PISA study are "sobering" and like living Groundhog day over and over again. They show no improvement since 2003. I can safely warn that we won't get things right until we arrive hands first.

It is time for a true renewal of Kindergarten and a restoration of school wood shops.

Make, fix and create...

occupations...

Stand for Kindle Fire HD

 I know many of us have nighttime reading materials at bedside. The table at the side of my bed is stacked with books. One is Robert Keable Row's 1909 book, the Educational Meaning of Manual Arts and Industries, and another is Milton Bradley's Quarter Century Edition of the Paradise of Childhood. I also have a travel guide to Finland deeper in the stack and language guides and dictionaries for speaking Swedish.

Last night I was reading through a small portion of the Paradise of Childhood that described the use of Froebel's 3rd gift, which consisted of a small cube box, with sliding top and was filled with 8 smaller cubes, which together stacked to form a perfect cube. The description and editor's notes on how the gift would be used in the classroom show a remarkable depth of analysis and illustrate the even more remarkable genius of Friedrich Froebel. It was a thing he acquired by watching the development of children... not by statistical analysis, which seems to be the only tool used by educational experts today.

Simple to make with wood and dowels.

Each of Froebel's gifts were used in the classroom to explore what were called "occupations", meaning that each gift could only come to life in the mind of the child through the exploration by that child through his or her hands. The occupations were in three categories representing life, knowledge and beauty. The first was that the objects themselves could be reconfigured by stacking into a variety of forms that were representative and symbolic of objects from real life. This occupation would be very familiar to any child who played with blocks, and yet the small number of blocks in the first set led to the making of simple things that one might find in the home and that would express relationship with others. One example shown in Paradise of Childhood was a chair, that when divided became two chairs, one for Grandmother and one for Grandfather. In this manner, play with blocks became representational of community and family life.

The second set of occupations with Gift 3 was to use the blocks to further the exploration of form and mathematics begun in the earlier gifts. Dividing and rearranging the smaller cubes from the larger gave the child an understanding of fractions, counting, and early math. These days, kids are given larger and larger sets of blocks and of Legos, without ever taking advantage of the potential they offer for the early exploration of math. The description in Paradise of Childhood of how the blocks were used to develop an understanding of fractions is fascinating.

The third occupation involved the arrangement and placement of the smaller cubes on a grid laid out as a permanent part of the Kindergarten table. By arranging the cubes, graphic forms offering a sense of beauty and symmetry were laid out. These shapes actually formed the child's introduction to drawing, and imparted a sense of order and control to the child's mind.

These three basic occupations could be applied to any of the gifts, as they imparted a sense of relationship to life, the development of intelligence in geometry and math, and the child's sense of beauty and form.

When the lessons involving the gifts were done for the day, each fit neatly into its special box, teaching the child responsibility in the use of his or her tools of learning.

Can you see the depth of learning involved? Can you see that we've come a long way since the first Kindergarten, and that very little of our progress was in the right direction? We did the same stupid thing to manual arts in schools. We made wood shops the place of choice to dump kids who weren't thought to be going anywhere, forgetting that the making of real things of useful beauty, was essential to the development of character and intellect for all kids.

Today we are hoping for cold. If the temperature on Thursday in Arkansas is very cold, we'll get snow rather than ice when the confluence of bitter cold and Gulf moisture hits the area on Thursday. My students in wood shop made toy cars and helped me to design and make a stand for a Kindle Fire that will be given away in a school raffle.

Make, fix and create...

texture, a lesson in design...

Student box makers at Laquey High School in Missouri

Texture is one of the essential design tools that can be used to make interestingly beautiful boxes. Just as the use of various colors of wood can add interest to a box, the use of various textures can do the same thing. The hand and eye are a tag team in the exploration of surface texture. When the eyes see something of interest, the hands instinctively reach toward the object of that interest to ascertain qualities of texture and form.


To plane or sand a surface smooth is one of the greatest pleasures to be found in woodworking. It offers immediate feedback to the craftsman and gives a sense of personal satisfaction as the work at hand moves from coarse to smooth.  And again, when the viewer of a finely crafted box sees an engaging surface, his or her hands will be called into action. Touch is a process of exploration that leads a viewer into more personal and intimate association with things and texture is the invitation.

Wood grain often offers the illusion of texture.  Woods like curly maple may give the illusion of varying depths through the reflection and refraction of light and the craftsman's careful sanding and finish can accentuate those depths, that are then surprising when the viewer runs his or her hand over the surface to discover it perfectly smooth to the touch. That kind of surprise is particularly effective in the design of a beautiful box.  It awakens the observer and calls him or her into deeper relationship with the box.

Did you know that smooth and rough textures are equally useful in the making of beautiful boxes? Many woodworkers have become so intent on achieving smooth surfaces that they over look the alternatives which also present interesting design options. Woods as they come direct from the sawmill often present textures that the craftsman can use to make boxes that are interesting, beautiful and surprising. Woods that are old and weathered tell a story of their own can also add interest to a beautiful box. When using rough woods, however, sand them smooth to the touch, so that they invite further hands-on exploration.

Textures you make yourself through the use of various tools, will make a plain piece of wood more interesting, and creating these textures can be part of the fun of box making. Again, sanding your created textures smooth to the touch will invite the viewers hands to engage more deeply with your beautifully crafted box, but sand only enough to make it smooth to the touch, and not enough to remove your carefully crafted marks.

I find it to be particularly interesting to juxtapose purposefully rough or textured surfaces with those that are perfectly smooth as a way of creating contrast in a box, just as I might choose to make it from two distinct colors of wood.

The photo above is one of three classes of high school students in Laquey, Missouri with boxes they made in shop class. It was sent by one of the teachers from my last summer's Missouri TEAM box making presentation. I've suggested to teachers that no one should graduate from high school without having the opportunity to make something beautiful, useful and lasting from wood. What could be better than a  box?

Make, fix and create...

color...

When I first began working with wood, I became intrigued with the variety of local hardwoods and the diverse colors and patterns of grain that they present. I began making inlay from my local Arkansas hardwoods as a way to illustrate the diversity and harmony of our local forest growth. Playing with this juxtaposition of colors, one alongside another  I gained a sense of what woods look good together. Even without an in depth analysis of why woods work well together, beautiful boxes can be made.

Sometimes the mixing of colors works well in a box, and sometimes the results are not as pleasing as the maker would hope, and so  I've been asked by my students how to mix and match colors and species of wood.  Are there some simple guidelines that can help a beginning box making to be more comfortable in the use of color?

One can see that colors being dark juxtaposed against light can provide contrast and draw greater attention to a box. Greater harmony in the use of color achieved by using woods of similar intensity and hue can bring a sense of unity to a box. Whether you choose to make a box as a bold statement that demands attention, or whether you choose to make a box for a more subtle purpose may help to suggest the appropriate use of color in making your box. So it is important to first examine your own goals. Bold statements are risky and you my find some advantage in being somewhat cautious in your use of color, particularly if you are just beginning your box making adventure. To minimize risk I offer some simple guidelines.

One thing you will discover in an examination of wood is that wood grain is not a consistent color.  It will consist of bands light and dark and of subtle differences in hue. A single species of wood may have darker lines of grain that may present an invitation to a craftsman to use woods of that darker color for accent or to provide contrast. Follow those invitations found in the grain of various species and you won't be far off the mark.

I've found that it is important to have a good reason for your use of color. Its more effective when it has a clear purpose. For example, the use of contrasting keys to reinforce miter joints, gently remind the viewer that the box was deliberately crafted to last for generations by a craftsman who cared about his or her work. Careful placement of those contrasting keys can create a sense of rhythm and visual balance in the design of the box. A small lift tab of a contrasting color informs the viewer where to place finger tips to open the box, so contrast can serve a purpose beyond aesthetics. A thin line of contrasting wood can highlight and frame a panel of figured hardwood, both accentuating that wood, and reminding of your careful craftsmanship. Just as a frame may be used to bring a painting to life, the body of a box done in one color of wood may highlight a more figured, colorful and attractive lid. Have simple clear design objectives for your use of colors in a box and those colors will work to make your box beautiful.

Make, fix and create...

warning. the dangers of a meaningful education...

This morning I will resume my participation in the Fall Art Fair from 10 AM to 2 PM. Sales yesterday were slight in comparison to what's happening these days in malls and big box stores, but it was lovely spending time with those who for some reason or another have developed a love for hand-crafted things.

I am always amazed at the breadth of creativity in this small place. To see the useful beauty made by my small local community is a feast for sad eyes.

So I must warn sincerely of the dangers of a civilization "intoxicated by the joy of making things."

Properly educated, students would gain a sense of their active side. They would understand the value of their materials, and their sources. They would know the use of various tools and be skilled in hand, eye and intellect. They would have a sense of the moral value of creative craftsmanship. Instead of wanting the things designed and made for them by others, they would be inclined seek the satisfaction of making things themselves. Our present measured economy would shrink due to the numbers of folks who would garden in season, and make too, in season, just as peasants in the far north would beautifully craft useful things in the firelight rather than sitting passively at TV screens whilst being lured to buy the next big and small things from distant makers, who were themselves distanced from the process of design and distanced from the profits of their labor. Our economy is based on luring folks to buy things they do not need... homes larger than could ever be necessary, filled with meaningless things. Instead, we might be lured by a proper education to live in much smaller homes filled with objects of useful beauty, each having greater meaning but providing less benefit to the economy that's measured as the constant selling and buying of distantly made disposable stuff.

And so I must warn that progressive education as described in this blog would be a dreadful danger to the status quo. The law of flow can be stated as follows: "Those engaged in the pleasures of craftsmanship must work constantly toward the greater refinement of that craftsmanship through tasks demanding full and total attention in order to receive the constant flow of positive feelings of full engagement in life." Folks captured by the law of flow would be led to withdraw from the cycle of commerce, and might instead choose more meaningful lives of ever evolving creative craftsmanship for themselves and their families. If that were to happen in more communities than my own, the malls and big box stores would suffer immense economic consequences. But with that in mind, there are 24 making days remaining until Xmas.
 
Randall sent a link to an article about German style apprenticeships at a factory in South Carolina. It appears to be a way to keep kids in school and supply industry with skills that are desperately needed if we are to compete in the manufacturing sector. Where Factory Apprenticeship Is Latest Model From Germany
 
Make, fix and create...