I'm about to sign a contract with Taunton Press for my 15th book. This one is tentatively titled "Designing Boxes," and will explore box making as a means of fulfillment, artistic creativity and personal growth. To prepare, I'm working on an outline and table of contents, as well as doing some reorganization in the wood shop.
In the meantime I'm also thinking about Otto Salomon's Educational Sloyd and the impact it once had.
When Salomon set up his school in Nääs, and to which thousands of teachers traveled from around the world to learn the ins and outs of the Sloyd method for teaching crafts to kids, part of his plan was to provide teachers with a philosophical and psychological basis for their teaching experience. He did this trough lectures presented in Swedish, English, German and French.
Ask teachers these days whether they've heard of Comenius, Pestalozzi, Cygnaeus, or Rousseau, and you'll find that most had not heard these names before. To become a teacher these days, is more about management of kids, and principals are hired for their management of teachers, and the ways we actually learn are generally ignored. Salomon sought to instill in his students at Nääs, a firm foundation in the philosophy and psychology of education.
Fortunately, learning is something we have all done and can reflect upon first hand if we are willing to do so. There is a risk involved... that by examining how we learn, we come face to face with how we were taught, and the inefficiencies and inequities of modern education.
One of my own realizations is that regardless of how hard a teacher might work to bring various student attentions to a singular point of focus, the needs of the mind to connect prior experience to what is already known and understood in various students' minds would place students all over the map in terms of how they might absorb and react to what they're being taught.
Diesterweg's guidance for curriculum development was to start with the interests of the child, then move from the known to the unknown, from the easy to the more difficult, from the simple to the complex and from the concrete to the abstract.
Of course various students would not have the same interests, nor would they have identical starting knowledge or be able to embrace the same level of difficulty due to each having had different prior experiences. Otto Salomon challenged the notion that there's such a thing as a class while planting an understanding that each child is unique and deserving of the teacher's attention. And he designed the teaching experience to bridge toward that goal, from the known to unknown, from easy to more difficult, from the simple to the complex and from the concrete to the abstract.
I may be guilty here of projecting onto Salomon what my own observations of education and learning have led me to understand, but I suspect that Salomon would agree with me that in order for education to be psychologically sound, students need to be doing real things, like the activities that wood shop can provide.
What was clearly different between Educational Sloyd and its rival, The Russian System, was that Educational Sloyd was interested in the development of the whole child, while the Russian System was designed to feed workers into the newly emergent industrial economy.
Make, fix and create....
