Today in the Clear Spring wood shop, the 1st and 2nd grade students made abacuses for the study of math. This was the completion of a project begun before spring break, so today, after some sawing, sanding and assembly they were ready to take home. The 3rd and 4th grade students continued with their study of paper Sloyd. Wyatt made a picture frame, the third model from Edna Anne Rich's 1905 book, Paper Sloyd.

There is an obvious math connection in the making and use of an abacus. The benfits of folding paper may be quite so obvious. But it requires careful measuring and the adding and subtracting of fractions. In addition, the development of 3-dimensional objects from 2-dimensional paper offers development of spatial visualization skills, essential to geometry, and trig. It offers skills that will be useful in engineering and the types of scientific modeling that may enable our students to better understand the universe.

I learned today that Stockton, CA woodworking bus teacher Jim Marsh retired and his wonderful bus was sold as surplus. Jim is busy playing in two bands and writing articles for woodworking magazines among other "retirement" activities. I am grateful to have the photos of his children at work, but sad to see the bus retired. It takes a great deal of time, love and attention to build a program like Jim's, and it means that at some point in time, when people again understand the value of such programs, someone will have to come along and built it from scratch... a daunting task.

Learning in the Garden Earth... At Clear Spring School this year, we adopted a theme for the year around which to build special projects, that of "Garden Earth". We have always been an ecologically minded school and were early to adopt recycling in all our classrooms. We have won the Keep Arkansas Beautiful first place award several times for our Trash-a-thon fund-raiser in which out students pick up waste and litter in Eureka Springs and Carroll County. So this year, our students have been planing gardens and building trails in addition to their regular studies. In an earlier blog post I brought up the connection between Friedrich Froebel, his development of the kindergarten, and the development of Educational Sloyd. Gardening is one of the very best ways to connect children with reality. A friend of mine in California, Bob Barnett, sent me a link to a School Gardening project his son James Barnett is doing in a school in Santa Maria, CA. It is the kind of project that children in all schools should be doing. It is a clear application of the Wisdom of the Hands. The photo above is of James in his school garden.

Today in the wood shop, the high school students started making canes to distribute to the elderly through our local free medical clinic. They are a bit carried away with wild designs, and I'm trying to reign them in just a bit to do practical work that will be more serviceable. Wish me luck! I had prepared stock for the 7th and 8th grades to do this project. Now that the high school has joined in, more stock will have to be prepared tomorrow.

The basic design is very simple. We use a Lee Valley round tenoner in an electric drill to cut tenons at each end of a stick. (we are using hickory) We drill a hole in a piece of wood to serve as a handle and put a rubber cane tip on the other end. It is an easy project that could be done start to finish in a day, but will probably take longer due to the amount of time students spend figuring out how to be different.

My own canes were featured in the June 2005 issue of Woodwork Magazine No. 93. The article was called "A Bird in the Hand, Making a Cane for Aunt Wuzzie." A photo from that article is shown above. The shafts were made of black walnut and the handles from walnut burl.

It is interesting how internal, abstract reality is shaped by external experience of the physical, including what we sense through our hands. When someone gets all "bent out of shape" in an argument, we say, "they have lost perspective," or "they are losing their grip." You can read George Lakoff's work on metaphor to come to a better understanding of this.

On a more practical matter, the use of the hands in practical things like woodworking helps in the understanding of much broader reality. A friend of mine, Charlie Futral is in the business of planning delivery of very large objects through the nation's highway system. Charlie was at one time a woodworker and furniture restorer, and he credits his previous work with his development of the spatial sense that allows him to visualize and plan the safe movement of very large objects through their journey prior to their actual departure.

Another metaphor for losing one's rationality over an issue is the following: "he's lost all sense of proportion." We know that proportion refers to the relationship between the length, width and depth of an object. Can it be that the understanding of proportion that comes through the use of the hands can actually extend rationality into abstract thought. Try it and see for yourself. I can tell you about it, but would you believe me? Watch what we are doing to our planet if you care to see what the extraction of human behavior from hands-on reality can do.

You may not have heard of Belmont Hill, an independent school near Boston. They have a strong woodworking program and are members of the New England Association of Woodworking Teachers and will be hosting the next meeting of the organization.

One of the interesting things about Belmont Hill is that as part of the graduation requirement, each student carves a wooden panel that remains as part of the school. It is a tradition that they started with the school's origin in 1923. You can search through an on-line data base of student panels and find some wonderful work. The photo above is of one of their students at work. The panel shown below is by William D. Elwell, Belmont Hill Class of 1927.

You may be aware of the tiny houses movement. In the face of McMansions and the incredible environmental insensitivity of the American public, there has been a movement to re-evaluate and reconsider our course.

Check out The Tiny Houses Website, tinyhouses.net for a look. My wife Jean, daughter Lucy and I built one that is featured on the site. There is something that happens to people when they lose the sense of scale that the hands provide. We get carried away. Houses become larger and more inefficient. We have to hire people to keep them in order. They fill to the brim with meaningless stuff. They take on a life of their own, having huge impact on the environmental resources.

There is a bumper sticker slogan that applies to our situation: Live Simply that others may simply live. It is something you probably wouldn't learn in the Christian churches in Northwest Arkansas, but it is a message shared by most of the wise men and prophets of history.

Our own tiny house was made as more of a luxury than a necessity of life. We have a larger home only yards away and our tiny house serves as a guest cottage and may have other uses in time. I am involved in building an art school in Eureka Springs, and the tiny house may serve as a model for student housing. We'll see. The photo above is our "tiny house."

The images at left and below are photos of some shelves I made in junior high. I remember when the nail went in and cracked the wood as shown, and I remember my disappointment, feeling I had ruined my hard work.

It was the last day of class and my teacher assured me that I had done a good job and that I shouldn't worry about it. I guess he was right. I got the shelves back from my mother when I went to visit her. They had been safely kept for over 40 years as evidence of my learning and growth, the way mothers commonly do that sort of thing.

I remember being in class, cutting out the sides of the shelves with a coping saw, thinking I was doing a pretty poor job of keeping to the lines. Then I looked over at the next bench and saw how far from the lines my neighboring student had wandered in his cut. I remember thinking, "I guess I'm not doing that bad."

As mentioned by Otto Salomon, the value of the child's work isn't in the object he or she makes, but in the child. It is called "growth." Thanks Mom, for keeping a memento.

Now, all these years have passed away from my junior high and high school years. There are only a few things I remember crystal clear from that time: One was 9th grade Spanish class when I was informed that President Kennedy was shot, another was the moment the nail split the wood and my teacher's kind response. What we do with our hands can have profound impact in our lives and our education. Help me hammer this issue straight in, no splits, no bends.

The following is excerpted from a review on Amazon.com of Alfie Kohn's book, Punished by Rewards:

In my own personal case, I am the mother of a very oppositional 11 year old. Over the years, I have used rewards (and punishments) to get him to behave, and as he's gotten older, he's only become more belligerent and angry. However, two weeks after embarking on "Punished by Rewards," I have backed off trying to control my son. While Kohn doesn't offer that many alternatives to rewards (he claims that each situation is unique and that one-size-fits-all discipline or behavior programs are presumptuous and, by definition, cannot work for everyone), somehow my relationship with my son is really improving as a result of my having read the book. My son and I hung out in our backyard this afternoon, hammering and sawing to make a ladder for a structure he's building, and we got along beautifully.

While Alfie Kohn's book is controversial...or at least behavioral psychologists don't seem to like it, rewards can be just as insidious as punishments in that they are designed (contrived) as an artificial means of controlling behavior. Both strip the dignity from the individual, by treating him or her as a stupid, insensitive idiot in desperate need of manipulation. There is something else entirely different at hand when one's feedback is from the real world and the reward comes in the direct sense of accomplishment.

This is something I've discussed previously in the blog. When you place a nail on a board, drive it in straight with a hammer, connecting two pieces of wood together strongly and without splitting the wood, there is a sense of accomplishment (effectance or efficacy) that leads to a desire to repeat the activity. When the nail bends, or the wood splits, the feedback isn't from an individual in the form of criticism, but simply the dispassionate response of the material. These are the rewards and "punishments" presented by the real world, and something quite different from the behavioral manipulations often offered in the artificial learning environments we call school.

Reading the review above and seeing the shift in parental attitude, I see that Alfie Kohn's book offered some magic. A hammer, saw, wood, and loving hands may have played their magic as well. The photo above is one more from Jim Marsh's Woodworking bus.

The following is a photo of work by Peter on Jim Marsh's woodworking bus. Every child needs the opportunity to explore his or her relationship with tools and hands in learning. Why is it that some adults just can't understand the needs children have to engage in creative work with their hands? Can someone explain it to me? Is it that they've never had the opportunity themselves?

The program I described yesterday in L.A. was inspired by a woman in San Diego named Sheila Dawson. She operated a woodworking bus for over 20 years, and also inspiring a similar program in Stockton, CA. Jim Marsh, operator of that bus tells the following: "I learned of her after I started developing my program and went to visit her the summer before I built my first bus. I borrowed a number of ideas from her set-up and then developed my own.
"A few years back I received an extra paycheck from my school district at the end of the year. Investigating further I found I had "earned" this extra money because--sometime during the preceding school year--I had brought my mobile shop and taught at one of our schools that had raised it's standardized test scores. No one could even tell me for sure which school it was. After almost 20 years teaching in what is now termed a "low performing, program improvement school" I take my act on the road and, ironically and suddenly, I'm a changed man--a "successful" teacher. I laughed all the way to Barnes and Noble where I bought a bunch of copies of Alfie Kohn's great book Punished By Rewards... a copy of which I gave to each member of our school board."

Last I heard from Jim Marsh, he was facing retirement from a system under a great deal of stress from NCLB legislation and pressures for increasing test scores. His program may no longer exist, but above and below are some photos of his kids at work.

When I was a kid, one of the things I wanted to do in life was to become an inventor. And surprise! I am an inventor of sorts. I make interesting things all the time to make my woodworking easier and more accurate. If you've read any of my books, you've seen a few. I don't make the kind of inventions that I can sell for a lot of money, but I can enable woodworkers to do better work.

Today, I've been making what I call "log cabin jigs" for routing recesses for installing custom designed drawer pulls on a set of cabinets. The "log cabin" jig gets its name from the over-lapping corners through which it is built up log cabin style around an object, and it is my own invention, or at least I've never seen anyone else make or use such a thing. It can be used for hinges or lock sets, or even for router table inserts, but has to be made special for each particular use. Fortunately they can be made in minutes. The image above is of the routed space, the jig, and the plunge router with bit and top mounted guide bearing. The photos below show the making of the jig. I'll show you another day what the finished pull will look like.

“I can’t be an artist… I can’t draw.” How many times has this broad generality stopped kids from ever pursuing or studying visual arts? This is ironic, because most contemporary artists we work with spend more time at Home Depot than an art supply store. Alternate Routes shows children that art is more concerned with creative problem solving rather than accurately replicating the natural world in 2 dimensions.

The preceding quote is from their website.

At some point, I may run out of things to say about the hands without plunging into the dark side. While the Wisdom of the Hands is about the wonder of it all... There is a dark side, and I guess I'll take a moment or so to bring it to light. Required hand positions and gestures are a tool through which societies and political or religious cultures impose intellectual conformity. Just think Nazi, here for the extreme, but what about the hands folded neatly in prayer? Of course the danger is when the conformity is reached, the mind is numbed, and the zealot is allowed to be in control.

All this is worth mentioning because it highlights once again, the direct connection between the hands and thought.

On a much brighter subject (a bright yellow school bus), the photo below is from a project bringing woodworking to kids in LA. The images above are from students at work on the bus. The project was featured in this month's Woodshop News. The Alternate Routes Education on Wheels Woodworking Program is in its 10th year and has served over 10,000 children in Los Angeles.

I feel like I turned a corner. Getting the synopsis off to an agent was a load off my mind, and now I return to the blog 20 lbs. lighter. It is impossible to know at this point what will happen, but I know it is only a matter of time before the world re-awakens to the hands. You and I get to be part of that re-awakening. The first step is to simply start noticing things from a perspective that includes an understanding of the significance of our hands.

My friend in Buffalo, NY, Mario Nunez observed the following..."reading about the role of the hands reminded me of my neighbor Rose, who as far as Mary and I are concerned, could not say a word if you were to tie up her hands. And if you point that out to her, she gets all embarrassed and tongue-tied." One of the things I noticed is that as I've become more comfortable in moving my hands during speech, I have become more fluent, more confident and more expressive. Being raised a Protestant in the Midwest may have been a handicap in my communication skills. I'm working to overcome it.

The photo above is of a display cabinet I made for a collection incredible turned and carved wood objects.

The synopsis and sample chapters have been sent off to the agent. Now it is time to cross fingers and go back to sanding. When you work with both the hands and the intellect, each refreshes the other.

We all know a great deal about our hands. We look down at the ends of our arms, and there they are. voilà! We do marvelous things with them. We touch the things that capture our attention. We pass our hands across the surfaces of objects to gain a better understanding of their qualities. We learn things about the world through our hands. We gain a sense of texture and temperature from our touch of things that can't be sensed as quickly or easily through the other sensory organs of our bodies. We discover the shape and weight of things through our hands, more quickly and efficiently than through our eyes. We connect with the world more deeply when our engagement is through our hands.

The world is close up and personal when within arms length, we take it by the hand. But the hands are so much more than just another sensory organ. We create through our hands, whether directly as we knead dough, or shape clay, or through our tools, which as extensions of the mind and hand shape the world to conform to our creative imaginations, our longings for comfort, security and even beauty. In essence, the hands are the instruments through which we define our human nature and continuously redefine, and re-make our own lives in reflection of our highest aspirations.

Still day 3 of synopsis, and I am reminded that at times the hands are only half as smart as the feet. The Chinese saying of the day is that if you want to know your heart's desire check your feet, or more precisely, "What the heart desires, the feet proceed toward without a moment's hesitation." Sometimes the hands can hesitate for much more than a moment, and the brain alone can take an eternity.

I went for a walk and visualized the finished book as I went along through the beautiful neighborhoods of my Victorian village.

My conclusion: the Wisdom of the Hands will be two books. The first is about 278 pages in length consisting of 15-20 interrelated essays, with a 10 page center section of color photos of my work, work that has been inspirational to me, and woodworking being done by my kids at Clear Spring School. The second book is the Wisdom of the Hands Workbook, designed to make what people have learned in the main text immediately accessible and practical. The second book would be large format, full color and 160 pages of kids projects with sidebars on safety, project planning and child development.

I may have the synopsis ready to send on Friday. Feel free to comment either by the comment function on the blog or via email.

More synopsis, day 3... So, why wisdom and what's the big deal about the hands? All my life, I have heard the word wisdom associated with age and experience, but the buzzword that has had everyone's attention for at least 3 generations is intelligence. It is something we can measure through batteries of psychometric tests.

So what about wisdom and why does it matter? If you use the word, wisdom, you get a funny look. It is a word from the past that people no longer think of or can relate to. It throws them for a loop. The computer has become the dominant tool of the age, displacing the hand in the expression of intelligence. If you use the computer as an analogy, you can think of intelligence as processing power. It is the speed and capacity of the processor and its connections through the motherboard... the ability to process data. Wisdom is more like programming... a collection of experiences and relationships that allow the intelligence of the machine to direct its output creatively and with greater purpose. If you think of intelligence as an expression of speed, you can think of wisdom as an expression of careful reflection, of quiet and of calm... of action based on deep understanding. In the view of our fast-paced society, "who needs it?"

Much of our current disassociation from our hands evolved from the concept that labor was something to be saved from. It's odious. It stinks, it sucks. It's dirty, it messes the nails. In the great scheme of things promised by our science fiction, our machines, our great labor saving devices, would take the place of our servants. The dishwasher would perform the odious task of cleaning up after dinner. The restaurant would save us from the tedious task of cooking in the first place. We've become people of measurable intelligence with important things to process at great speed. Who would want to slow down, savor the hand's moment in the making of things, its immersion in warm water as the dishes are done? There are movies to watch, other forms of passive entertainment and distraction to attend to.

Is it any great surprise that the hurry of things makes stress, and that stress leads to distress? Is it any great surprise that as we have become more passive and powerless in our own lives, depression and anxiety have become the primary forms of mental illness?

Can all of this be explained in a book? Would it be best that I offer a few hints and challenges so that people discover from their own relationship to their hands, new meaning and purpose in their lives? The best lessons of life are the ones we learn from our own experience. In fact, the only things we really learn at the core of our beings are the things we learn "first hand."

Have a great day, and feel free to comment or share, either in the comment section or by email... The photo above is of carving on a cherry entertainment center. The carving pattern is one reflecting a study of plant sciences, and the piece was commissioned by a senior scientist at the Noble Foundation in Ardmore, OK.

More synopsis...This morning I mentioned that the hand led the brain in the development of man. It came first. This same pattern is played out in the life of every child...the use of the hand drives the development of the brain. If you doubt this, take a few minutes to observe a toddler at work. I mentioned that there is evidence...academic evidence, and ongoing research that describes the significance of the hands...research on gesture that indicates that the movement of the hands facilitates the movement of thought. The use of the hands facilitates the assembly of complex mental concepts and the visualization of concepts.

But the Wisdom of the Hands isn't about the current research. It is about what you can discover for yourself, by observing and taking notice of your own hands. And the purpose of the Wisdom of the Hands isn't an academic one. It isn't just to bring slight modification in your thinking, but to change your life from passive to active, from dependent on the teachings of others to direct knowledge of the world acquired through your own hands. It is about both sensing and creating, with greater consciousness, allowing the hands to shape the life in greater dimension.

The hands are such a broad and complex subject. It will take awhile to get all this down, and perhaps even longer to edit it into a concise 3 or 4 page text. When things go across an editor's desk at a major publishing house. It has to get them in the first sentence. You can see I have a lot of work to do.

More tomorrow.

So, this is the beginning of the synopsis for the Wisdom of the Hands.

There are a number of things we know about the hands... and I want to summarize quickly what we know, how we know it, and then proceed into why we need to have the hands engaged in education.

First, we know from a long history of the study of anthropology and cultural anthropology, the essential and defining role played by the human hand. Our whole history is understood by the artifacts created or expressed though the activities of our hands, from religious icons, cave paintings, rock carvings, and the remains of everyday objects. The work of the hands are the highest expressions of our humanity. But even deeper, is the essential role of the hands in the development of man as a species. Homo Sapiens has also been called Homo farber, man the maker. The development and use of tools has been the foundation of the success of our species... and may present the greatest threat to our future survival. Anthropologists know at this point that the hand and brain co-evolved as a behavioral system, and are so seamlessly integrated that the hands move out from direct consciousness of them to attain that state. It is natural that we overlook the education of the hands in school. When they are functioning in their highest levels of intelligence and skill, sensing, expressing and creating, we are not aware even of their presence. But in this technological age, to continue to ignore them in the planning of the education of our children will have tragic consequences.

I can't do all this at one sitting and have shop work to do, also.

Here is the outline as it exists in my head at the moment.

1. My own story of engagement in the use of my hands.
2. The human history of engagement.
3. Educational Sloyd, Friedrich Froebel, Pestalozzi, etc.
4. Clear Spring School
5. Stages of development in the use of the hands, adult education...
6. The shaping of the interior landscape of human experience.