schools, reading and poverty

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has a new report which can be downloaded from their website, showing the connection between reading proficiency at third grade, the effects of poverty and dropping out from school prior to completion of high school.

Many lay the blame on failing American schools on the schools themselves or on their teaching staff. But the profound effects of poverty on student success as described by this report tell another story.

"Overall, 22 percent of children who have lived in poverty do not graduate from high school, compared to 6 percent of those who have never been poor. This rises to 32 percent for students spending more than half of their childhood in poverty.

For children who were poor for at least a year and were not reading proficiently in third grade, the proportion that don’t finish school rose to 26 percent. That’s more than six times the rate for all proficient readers.

One might assume from this study that one of the handles we might have on accelerating learning in American schools would be to more effectively push children's reading success at an earlier age. According to the report,

"Educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of mastering reading by the end of third grade. Students who fail to reach this critical milestone often falter in the later grades and drop out before earning a high school diploma."

People reading such reports, should first read a book called How to Lie with Statistics, because there are very simple ways to manipulate data to create additional emphasis raising the weight of particular ideas that you want to put forth. In one line of the report it states "One in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers." In another statement it mentions the "22 percent who have lived in poverty." One in 6 seems like a pretty hefty number, until you realize that it is only 16.67%. In other words, and slightly under emphasized in the report, poverty is a significantly greater problem than the simple matter of reading ability at the 3rd grade level. Those driving the discussions of school reform in the US often seem more interested in tweaking small aspects of education than in addressing the root cause of poor performance, poverty. Here in Arkansas, 57 percent of Arkansas public school students were from low-income families, a 12 percent increase from 45 percent in 1999.

I'm not sure how educators can reconcile all this with the experience in Finland's schools where they do not begin teaching reading in schools until age 7 (our second grade), but then far surpass American students in reading by age 15 as measured in PISA testing. Better readers in 25% less time should be the headline capturing the attention of American educators, but it is not. One of the differences in Finland schools is that teachers are better able to time "reading" to "reading readiness", and can spend the early years focusing on other important components of child development, like cooperative and creative problem solving, and even wood shop.

Can it be that spending more time in recess and creative activities might offer children in poverty greater success and opportunity in school? Please don't hold your breath waiting for American educators to come to their senses. But,

Make, fix and create.

The image above is of my reliquary of wood which contains samples of 25 Arkansas species. The piece is inspired by the old children's game "Here's the church, here's the steeple, open the doors and see all the people." My small maple chapel is peopled with the woods of Arkansas.

today at ESSA

Beth Ireland and Turning Around America spent the day at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts. We had refreshments, hot dogs for lunch, and students had the opportunity to make whistles and turned pens. Members of a local turning club came to support Beth in her efforts. You can see some of the process in the photos at left and below.

It was most interesting to see a complete woodworking shop carried in the back of a van, leaving enough room for sleeping, book making and Beth's life on the road. Tomorrow we will spend about an hour preparing for children's classes on Monday and Tuesday.

building on a base of knowledge

If you understand the concept of scaffolding, you will also understand a few of the basic principles suggested in early pedagogy. Followers of Pestalozzi including Otto Salomon, laid their principles out as follows:

Move from the known to the unknown, from the easy to the more difficult, from the concrete to the abstract, and from the simple to the complex, building upon the interests of the child.

Today, I am launching myself on a learning adventure in that this is (for me) the first day of "Turning around America." Beth Ireland arrives today and we are planning a bit of time in the Clear Spring School wood shop in preparation for tomorrow's demonstration and hands-on learning at ESSA. Saturday, 9-4 PM!!!

When you already know something about a subject, you are in the best position to learn more. And so I am looking forward to what I can learn from Beth to supercharge my own learning (and teaching) as she takes her turn teaching my kids and in my community. I expect my students to learn a few things as they already have time invested in the lathe. I will learn even more, because I have even greater time invested in building my own knowledge working and teaching on the lathe. Get it?

We have a few things backwards in education in the US. If you go to a university, they will first present the theorem, then present the proof. The assumption is that what they present is true, and yet, it is difficult for students to integrate knowledge without experiential foundation for it's support. Bruner, Pea and others have described that as scaffolding, a construct that supports advancement in learning.

In teacher's colleges, students should start with practice teaching on day one. In chemistry students should start in the lab. What is there about this that people have so much difficulty understanding? In other words, I am here to present an otherworldly notion.

Make, fix and create. Do first, learning follows.

a test of wills?

Felix Adler, in his address on the value of manual training, delivered to the National Conference of Charities and Correction, Buffalo, 1888, considered the matter of will as it relates to both the children of poverty, and the sons and daughters of the intellectual elite.

"... history, geography and arithmetic are not, as a rule, interesting to young children, especially not to young children of the class with which we are now dealing. These listless minds are not easily roused to an interest in abstractions.

Secondly, it is a notorious fact that intellectual culture, pure and simple, is quite consistent with weakness of the will. A person may have very high intellectual attainments, and yet be morally deficient. I need hardly warn my reflective hearers that, when emphasizing the importance for the will of intellectual culture, I had in mind the intellectual process as applied to acts. To cultivate the intellect in its own sphere of contemplation and abstraction, apart from action may leave the will precisely as feeble as it was before."

What Felix Adler proposed for both classes was for children to actually do things in school and thereby become acquainted with physical reality, through investigation of how things actually work, and are made. Engagement in physical reality as craftsman and creator was viewed as essential by Adler and others of his time to the full development of human qualities and character. Instead of memorizing answers, as proposed by one side or another, the idea was to investigate and inquire, and test in physical reality... Not just make stuff up, or accept what had been made up by others.

This morning I see that the American government is at a crisis point, in which tea-party activists are pushing for a government shut down to make their point. It is claimed as a test of wills, one vs. the other, but things have gotten out of hand. They seem to be detached from the real everyday needs of the American people. Where were shop classes, laboratory science and the arts when we needed them most?

Make, fix and create.

turning around America

Today in the Clear Spring School wood shop, first, second and third grade students will be finishing their looms, working on name plates for their desks (they are learning to write their full names) and will do a bit of paper sloyd, as they are developing their measuring skills.

We are also looking forward to this weekend with woodturner Beth Ireland. Her project Turning Around America is bringing her to Eureka Springs for one day at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts, and then two days with the students of Clear Spring School. The event at ESSA on Saturday is open to the public, and it will be a great chance for newbies (of all ages) to get their first chance at turning on the lathe.

MISSION STATEMENT

"I want to empower people through the act of making objects with their own hands. I will achieve this by teaching woodturning and simple woodworking to as many people as I can, while traveling across the United States in a van that contains a mini workshop and personal living space." -- Beth Ireland 2010

Beth has now taught 1900 people in her quest to teach woodturning in all 50 states. In other words, Make, fix and create. Our humanity is most fully expressed through our hands.

viewing the scaffold from within

I am still working on my attempt to use a diagram to come to a better understanding of educational scaffolding. I find it fascinating that my use of the term scaffold in the blog, now has me targeted for advertising and email related to real, physical scaffolding for sale, but I guess that loss of privacy is the price I pay for sharing my own exploration of educational principles with readers in this blog. Maybe someday the technology will become smart enough to know the difference between educational scaffolding (a metaphorical use of the term) and physical scaffolding like someone might use on a construction site or want to sell on eBay. Don't count on the Internet for being smart, yet, which is part of the point of my discussion today.

I've mentioned that there are two traditional uses for scaffolding. One is to lift the worker to a particular height. The other is to serve as structure within which a form is constructed. Both are applicable to the concept of educational scaffolding, but to see the scaffold as that form within which the student's scholarship is formed, invites us to look more closely at the legs of the scaffold itself and to examine the relationship between the student and those components of his or her growth.

If you view the scaffold from within, as would the student whose life is under construction, and look at the four corners which have you surrounded, those are technology, a teacher or mentor, a culture of inquiry (or not) and your own personal experience. Any of those could be at various times, the principle component leading to your educational success. In an earlier time in which the pencil might  have been your only tool in the classroom, the teacher/mentor, your own experience, and the culture of learning would play balanced roles in your growth as a scholar.

One of the things I've been noticing is that students in the classroom are having increasing difficulty in paying attention and following directions. There has been some speculation among educators that the computer is actually changing the ways we think and learn, and as you poke keys and move impulsively from website to website, you may notice the same changes in yourself.  If you visualize the scaffold from the point of view of the student, you see that technology has become the major component in children's lives and learning, dwarfing the relationship with a mentor and even dwarfing the student's relationship to his or her own experience. The role of culture in our current technology dominated scaffold could be described as "translateral" in that it expands the child's relationships outward as with Facebook, etc. (not upward) without regard for future growth or the growth of cooperative inquiry.

I discussed this today with my 7th and 8th grade woodworking scholars and one noted that technology teaches about things, but that real teachers help you learn how to actually DO real things.

It seems like no one is concerned.  Maybe you and I and a few like-handed souls rowing against the growing technological cacophony can do a few very small things to stem the tide.

Make, fix and create.

Mr. Mens, meet Mr. Manus

The motto at MIT is one that most wisdom of the hands readers would appreciate, Mens et manus, which means mind and hand. It should probably be spelled as a single word as the hand and mind are functionally entwined except in those cases in which men or women work thoughtlessly with the hands on the one hand or in complete separation from reality on the other. The following essay is by David Brittan and was published by the MIT Review in November/December 1995, and is republished here with permission of the author.

Mr. Mens, Meet Mr. Manus By David Brittan

My pal Dickie, an accomplished woodworker with whom I sometimes collaborate in the role of slightly retarded apprentice, likes to satirize the lowbrow status of his craft. Explaining some technical point, he'll say archly, "It's all in Barclay's monograph on beveling or "Surely you've read Wallace on studs." Then we'll both have a good laugh and go back to our scraping and banging.

As it happens, there really is a classic literature of woodworking. Asher Benjamin, a Boston builder of the early nineteenth century, summed up his wisdom in volumes such as The Builder's Assistant (1800) and The Practical House Carpenter (1830). Minard Lafever, who signed himself "architect and practical builder in the City of New-York," published The Young Builder's General Instructor in 1829. It was intended as a follow-on to the copious writings of the British builder Peter Nicholson—the Bob Vila of his time—whose name was known to all who shoved a plane.

Naturally, these books are full of helpful hints. They offer rules of thumb for sizing newel posts and gluing planks, and tips on fitting veneer to a curved surface ("prepare a quantity of hot water and put the veneer into it, and there let it remain until it becomes as soft as a piece of leather"). But more than that, they offer geometry. Reams and reams of geometry. To read Nicholson on handrails is to wrestle with pages of tricky operations on line segments and with diagrams so elaborate you might think you were splitting atoms, not wood.

Contrary to its image, woodworking is not all handiwork. In fact, the more one learns about it, the more one wonders why it is classified as a manual trade—and the less one wonders why it has been a haven for rebel intellectuals Although parents may despair when their child throws over a prep-school or Ivy League education for a career as a carpenter or joiner, and although the ranks of woodworkers are swollen with refugees from physics and English Lit. whose former colleagues grumble that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, working with wood is as much a mental activity as a manual one—as much mens as manus. There are no minds wasted here.

The Euclidean mysteries of joinery and construction are one thing—the dovetail or mortise-and-tenon joints that divide fine furniture from cheap, the well-fashioned beams that divide solid dwellings from deathtraps. But the tools and materials are a study in themselves. They are quirky enough to challenge the keenest intellect and completely baffle the rank beginner (that would he me).

On short acquaintance with the craft, I will venture my own rule of thumb: the simpler the tool, the harder it is to use. Electric table saws and routers afford speed, precision, and a comfortable distance from the mechanical properties of the lumber. Handsaws, planes, and chisels force you to experience wood at the level of cellulose fillers and resin—as bundles of splinters, in other words—and grant success in direct proportion to your skill. It is with such humble implements that woodworkers spend the bulk of their time.

Because the tools of the trade have changed little since the Romans, a body of lore has had a couple of thousand years to grow up around each one. For example, a clean cut does not saw itself; it may require any number of cunning devices— from a wedge placed in the kerf (the slit made by the saw) to keep the saw from binding, to a line of masking tape that prevents plywood from splintering—all of which the woodworker must learn or be laughed off the shop floor.

These subtleties are multiplied by the number of subspecies into which each tool has branched. There's the firmer chisel (firmer than what I couldn't tell you), which has a flat blade without a bevel. The mortise chisel is for cutting rectangular holes, or mortises, in furniture legs. The pocket chisel is not at all what it sounds like (it resembles the firmer chisel but has a beveled blade), the butt chisel even less so. Then there are those cousins with hollowed-out blades, the gouges. And the saw's taxonomy would fill several pages.

Sandpaper is the simplest tool and also the most dangerous, especially in the hands of an amateur. The cherry mantelpiece I just completed appears ravaged by time. "It looks like a real antique," says Dickie, putting the best face on things. But age alone could not account for flaws like these. I have sanded down crisp corners, thinking I was doing the wood a favor. I have rubbed right through the thin veneer on an expensive piece of cherry ply, leaving a bald spot that Dickie has been good enough not to mention. I have overlooked the milling marks created by the lumber yard, allowing them to soak up dark stain in the pattern of a bar graph. I have even made ripples on surfaces that were once calm. Obviously, I should have read Spence and Griffiths on the importance of the sanding block: "Never use just your hand to hold the abrasive paper when sanding flat surfaces," they warn in a latter day handbook. "This will sand away the softer part of the wood, giving a wavy surface."

From time to time I fantasize about an alternative career in furniture making. It must be satisfying to create lovely, useful objects that you know will outlast you, and to tax your mind in the process. But the motto of Gustav Stickley, the great turn-of-the-century furniture designer, is a strong deterrent: "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." If I apply myself now, I might manage a decent rocking chair by the time I need one.

David Brittan is currently is the editor of Tufts Magazine.

Today in the Clear Spring School wood shop, the 4th, 5th and 6th grade students finished looms, windmills, books and did exercises in paper sloyd. The 10th, 11th and 12th grade students worked on  business card holders as an exercise in their study of economics.

Make, fix and create.

slow making

We've all heard of the slow foods movement. The idea of making things quickly, too easily, thus providing empty calories for the creative soul is a notion we should explore, and thence avoid as unhealthy for the human spirit. Blog reader Amy sent the following quote from a novel, Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. LeGuin:

"It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say."

One of the things that can slow a person down in woodworking is the knowledge that what one makes can last a hundred years or more. When an item is crafted with useful beauty in mind, it transcends not only the years it may last, but also the need one might feel to hurry in its making. What are the few extra minutes to do things right when each moment of attention is witnessed in the finished piece for such a lengthy span of time? What's the rush in the light of generations?

We have become so impulsive, so undeliberative in our actions, that I urge my readers to contemplate the very slow making of things. Can we invest greater mind through the application of conscious attention of greater magnitude in the making of the things that fill our lives and awaken our sense of beauty? And what would the effects of such actions be?

It seems that much of our hurry is driven by the metaphor, "time is money." But time is not money. It is the opportunity to invest care, carefulness, attention, listening. What if our new metaphor for time was craftsmanship?

Make, fix and create.

the anti-tiger mother approach

Time Magazine has an article this week about Finland's Educational Success-the anti-tiger mother approach." I'm very interested in Finland in part because it was the home of educational sloyd, and also because their educational method comes closest to our own at the Clear Spring School. I also presented a paper at the University of Helsinki and visited the wood shop there where kindergarten teachers learn to teach woodworking to their students, so I have been following the success of Finland's school model for some time. There are many educators from around the world wandering off to Finland to see what they can glean from Finland's methods. You can save big money by visiting here in Northwest Arkansas and would likely be just as blown away by what we are doing at the Clear Spring School.

The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education. It surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good. They did, however, decide to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And to put it in a way that would make the noncompetitive Finns cringe, they kicked major butt. The Finns have participated in the global survey four times and have usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science.

In the latest PISA survey, in 2009, Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading. The U.S. came in 15th in reading, close to the OECD average, which is where most of the U.S.'s results fell.

The closest competitors are China and Korea where they use an oppressive rote memorization technique rather than one stimulating hands-on learning and student inquiry. So here in the US, we have a choice. We can either crack the whip and lose our creative edge and crap-can our joy of learning in the same snap, or we can move more clearly and firmly in the direction offered by Clear Spring and the hearty Finns.

The photo above is of students testing the mineral exploration tools they made in the Clear Spring School wood shop.

Make, fix and create.

the creative act

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

A friend last night was explaining to me that Newton's discovery was not from an apple falling from a tree, but from his speculations, as to how hard an apple must be thrown to circle the earth as dos the moon. We thus see that discovery is not merely a passive thing that happens to one in the course of time, but is a thing that takes place on the active side. When asked how he knew what he had discovered was true, Newton, answered, "I've done the calculations."

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." — Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man)

And so we can see that we'd best not create schools for the distribution of knowledge but for the stimulation of inquiry.

make, fix and create

at a land grant university

Today I am at the University of Wisconsin where my daughter is considering graduate school. We've been walking around the beautiful campus and I've been thinking about Jonathan Baldwin Turner who as father of all the Land Grant colleges in the US believed that every state should have a great university. The idea of course was to put education in the hands of the more common people. How about that?

His work led to the enabling legislation through which the University of Wisconsin was created. Surprisingly, he was a great friend also of the manual arts and a reformer against classical lecture based learning which too many have adopted in his absence. The following is from his Griggsville Address, May 1850:

"...a classical teacher who has no original, spontaneous power of thought, and knows nothing but Latin and Greek, however perfectly, is enough to stultify a whole generation of boys and make them all pedantic fools like himself. The idea of infusing mind, or creating or even materially increasing it, by the daily inculcation of unintelligible words--all this awful wringing to get blood out of a turnip--will, at any rate, never succeed except in the hands of the eminently wise and prudent, who have had long experience in the process; the plain, blunt sense of the unsophisticated will never realize cost in the operation. There are, moreover, probably, few men who do not already talk more, in proportion to what thy really know, than they ought to. This chronic diarrhea of exhortation, which the social atmosphere of the age tends to engender, tends far less to public health than many suppose."

"The most natural and effective mental discipline possible for any man arises from setting him to earnest and constant thought about things he daily does, sees and handles, and all their connected relations and interests. The final object to be attained, with the industrial class, is to make them thinking laborers; while for the professional class we should desire to make laborious thinkers; the production of goods to feed and adorn the body being the final end of one class of pursuits, and the production of thought to do the same for the mind the end of the other. But neither mind nor body can feed on the offals of preceding generations. And this constantly recurring necessity of reproduction leaves an equally honorable, though somewhat different, career of labor and duty open to both, and, it is readily admitted, should and must vary their modes of education and preparation accordingly."

 I have to wonder what would happen if the powers of social networking were applied to the situation that we have in American education. If twitter and facebook could bring real live revolutions to Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, what would happen if we were to use the same powers towards the adoption of hands on learning? To make, fix, and create  are movement in direct opposition to mindless consumerism which has become the enslavement of the middle class. Working for cheap goods is the same thing as consuming empty calories, in that they provide no nourishment for the creative spirit.

Make, fix and create. Use social networking to share what you have done. We might just have a revolution on our hands.

taken by the hand

On the one hand it just feels great to make things. On the other, the hands help us to understand what it means to be a human being. And so, by neglecting to get our children hands-on engaged in their learning, we simply forget some of what is most essential in the development of their character and intellectual capacity.

I continue to welcome many new readers to the blog, directed here by the article in the New York Times.

If you are new here, I invite you to give greater consideration to your hands. They do thousands of things each day for which we give them little notice. They sense the world around us and then shape it in ways that have in most cases made it more hospitable to us, and yet we give them little credit for their contributions to human life.

Anaxagoras was the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who first discovered nous, or mind, and he also said that "Man is the wisest of all animals because he has hands." And so you can see that the acknowledgement of the role of the hands in shaping human intelligence is not a new thing, but rather something you can explore for yourself.

Make, fix and create. Then create opportunities for others (particularly children) to do the same.

taking a straight shaving off a plank...

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

Today I have many new visitors to the blog due to the New York Times Article on woodworking for kids. I put a link in yesterday's post to take readers to some of my published articles and papers on woodworking education. The quote above from Ruskin describes both the intrinsic and extrinsic effects of hands-on learning. One parent from Clear Spring School had mentioned to me that while many classes may teach students things about the world, woodworking seemed to also teach the child about him or her self.

After writing the Wisdom of the Hands blog for about 5 years, I've written thousands of posts, each trying to explain something about the hands. You could spend way too much time and read them all, but you would learn so much more by getting involved in crafts of some kind and leading your own children or grandchildren into that journey with you as your companions.

If you are here with more general concerns you might want to acquaint yourself with David Henry Feldman's essay, The Child as Craftsman. It provides insight that should be considered by all those concerned with education reform. Take a straight shaving off a plank.

Make, fix and create.

Sometime this evening...

This evening, Julie Scelfo's article about woodworking for kids came out in the New York Times and I've posted a link here, Woodworking Classes for Kids, for my for my regular readers to enjoy. The article may bring new readers to the blog, and if you are here for the first time, I would like to direct you to resources. You can find some of my published materials on woodworking education through this blog page, Links to Published Works. You can also find my article about woodworking with kids at the Fine Woodworking website here.

If you are a regular reader, you will have given some thought to the power of hands-on learning in your own life. If you are new here, your own hands extend an invitation to explore your own learning styles and needs. You will notice in your own life that the things you've learned hands-on are best remembered and most deeply acquired. And so the question arises, "If that is so, why would we choose to offer such minimal educational engagement to our children, leaving them bored in school and unacquainted with their own creative power?"

Today in the Clear Spring School wood shop, 7th and 8th graders were making their own t-squares and beginning technical drawing, learning to think and express ideas in pictures. I sent my own drawing of educational scaffolding to Jerome Bruner, 95 who was one of the originators of the concept. He told me that drawings are not that useful to him, but he hopes that my sketch of the principle of educational scaffolding will be useful to others. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but not all are as comfortable thinking in pictures as some may be, and it is not so much a matter of intellect, but of practice. In the wood shop, I'm using the illustration to invite my 7th and 8th grade students to reflect on their own learning.

This afternoon, my first grade woodworking students made looms in preparation for their spring camping trip during which weaving will be one of the camp activities.

To you, I renew my invitation, make, fix and create.

scaffolding, two forms...

There are two ways that educational scaffolding should be considered. A set of scaffolds can lift a worker to a higher level to perform operations otherwise impossible, but scaffolding can also be used to provide a rigid structure within which a complicated construct can be given shape. Either of these can serve as a metaphor for educational processes. In the case of the latter version of scaffolding, the interior space within the scaffold forms Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. So you can think of scaffolding as a platform upon which to stand in preparation for climbing to the next level, or you can see it as a seamless engagement in lifelong learning. The choice is yours.

Make, fix and create.

a culture of inquiry

I want to focus this morning on an important part of the scaffold, the leg that I've called "Culture of inquiry" in the illustration below. Inquiry is what drives both artists and scientists forward in their work. To be part of a culture of inquiry further enables the individual inquiry of lifelong learners. A chemist in his work may seek an understanding of chemical reactions in the laboratory. A botanist may attempt to locate and identify rare and endangered plants. An artist may be examining the juxtaposition of colors and forms. The process is the same testing of hypothesis in each and every case, and to see arts and science as estranged in American education is absurd.

In naming that particular leg of the scaffold, I was deliberate in not naming it culture of "learning," because learning covers less precise territory. You can learn and remember facts as they are presented, and memorize them without question, accepting dogma, the death of real learning, the expulsion of science and stagnation in the arts. The culture of inquiry is more direct, lasers into specific points, and extends more widely and well beyond the school walls.

This morning, a group of educators from the University of Arkansas will visit Clear Spring School. They are a group whose mission is to explore the value of arts integration, and they want to see visit schools demonstrating successful arts integration. I've told them that our mission is not integration of the arts, but rather, integration of the hands. If you know about the hands, you'll know that the hands question everything. The hands are not only seeking the truth, but when engaged have the capacity of finding it.

This small group of educators will seek the truth of Clear Spring School, and by being here with us, will find an important ingredient for restoring and renewing American education. Fingers are crossed.

It seems an important message has been received and understood at the top of the US government as described in an article President Obama stresses on education beyond tests "An excessive focus on tests within schools could actually make students lose interest in education and teach them less about the things that are important," says President Barack Obama. Now let's hope he does something about what he has observed.

"All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that's not going to make education interesting," said the president, adding that it was unlikely that young people would do well in something that they find boring.

Haven't we been saying that? Obama also advocates more technology. But if there's technology needed, you can find little of greater educational value than the standard tools you'll find in wood shop. Woodworking builds both character and intellect, and the widely acknowledged American educational decline roughly correlates with the decline of wood shop and the arts in American schools. In the meantime, Obama and his department of education may be working at cross purposes, with him asking for less testing and the department asking for more and more. To lead, you do have to get out front with your objectives.

My readers in New York should plan to pick up a paper on Thursday and should look in the Homes Section for an article on woodworking for kids.

Update. We had a great visit with folks from the U of A. The first, second and third grade class was set up as a dinosaur museum and the students were docents explaining their work and their discoveries. Who could not be impressed by such educational enthusiasm? We in turn were equally impressed with our guests. Education in America is a thing we care deeply about, and to spend time with friends who share a commitment to the arts in education is always a powerful event. I extend my most sincere gratitude for the opportunity to share the wonders of Clear Spring School and hands-on learning.

Make, fix and create.

I keep trying...

I know this may be boring to some, but I am still working on the sketch of the concept of scaffolding, and needed to add one more point, that of what Vygotsky's 1978 concept, "zpd" or zone of proximal development, "the zone of activity in which a person can produce with assistance what they cannot produce alone (or can only produce with difficulty)." My own zones of proximal development become clear in a variety of areas in my life. On the internet, I am dependent on my computer, my wireless internet server, the vast array of network connections, and the whole range of service providers that take what I type and share it with you. In my woodshop, I have tools, materials, and space which in association with what I've learned and the skills I've garnered allow me to make what I make. In schools, you can see that the zpd of students is only partly what comes from within the child. As a pottery student in 1974, I knew that there were things that I could do at school with clay and firing equipment provided that could only be done outside of school after overcoming a mountain of resistance, that of acquiring those materials and equipment, along with even greater expertise to manage them.

Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is the space noted within the scaffold, the circumstances provided by technology, mentoring, the child's prior experience and the culture of inquiry, supporting learning and growth.

"The specialization of the hand-this implies the tool, and the tool implies specific human activity, the transforming reaction of man on nature...the animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; man, by his changes, makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals."--Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky

Today in the Clear Spring School wood shop, the 4th, 5th and 6th grade students made weather vanes. When they were complete, of course the children needed to run and test them in the wind outside the wood shop as shown.The high school students helped me to clean the wood shop to prepare for visitors from the University of Arkansas and began work on business card holders as an economics exercise.

All hands...

All Hands is the sailor's cry to bring all able bodied seamen on deck to meet the immediate needs of the ship. It is not the cry for idlers and stand-abouts, but states the necessity for immediate action.

American education has been heading for shoal waters for some time. The crisis in education is not new. But, as stiff winds of international competition are driving us to an unwelcoming shore, the cry, "All Hands," is never more appropriate than now. In sailor parlance, the hands are not merely objects dangling loosely at the ends of tattooed arms but serve as a metaphor for the whole man, with all his attention, his training, his skill and best efforts applied.

It may seem odd that each of us have experienced learning something hands-on but then commence to ignore the power of hands-on learning for our kids. From our own personal experience we know that we learn more quickly, more deeply, more effectively, and to greater long-term effect when our hands are engaged in learning. In learning hands-on we practice and apply ourselves and all of our attentions more fully, and yet, we seem to find no reason for our children's educations to be hands-on, no reason to provide them with the actual experiences they need for the practice and development of their own powers.

When we fully understand the value of hands-on learning, we understand the rationale for the arts, for wood shop, for athletics, for laboratory science, and all those things that schools have been dropping from unwary hands like hot cakes.

Schools should be no place for idlers and stand-abouts. I make the call, All hands. If you'd like a simple formula for the restoration of American education, put hands to work in learning. Restore the arts and manual arts to American education. It won't happen easy and it won't happen quick. First step is to make a commitment to hands-on learning. Set it as your goal. You will witness a rise in interest, a rise in passionate student engagement.

Among early educators, particularly those infected with intellectual smuggery, there were thoughts that skill with the hands was the gift that God gave to those who had not received the many blessings of intellectual capacity. What a crock of flaming crap that is. Skilled hands and intellectual capacity are not an either/or proposition. Both come with work, both come with practice. And each has the potential of augmenting and enhancing the powers of the other. The motto at MIT, after all, is Mens et Manus (Mind and Hand). Get the point?

I have further refined my illustration of the principle of scaffolding, and its application to both science and the arts.

Make, fix and create.

decline of the arts...

Jacob Bronowski said:

“The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.”

You can download a report Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation, here, documenting the steady decline of the arts in schools.

“In America, we do not reserve arts education for privileged students or the elite. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds, students who are English language learners, and students with disabilities often do not get the enrichment experiences of affluent students anywhere except at school. President Obama recalls that when he was a child ‘you always had an art teacher and a music teacher. Even in the poorest school districts everyone had access to music and other arts.’ Today, sadly, that is no longer the case.” – U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, April 9, 2010

The arts are what make learning relevant in the lives of children. The arts are what lure parents to participation is schools through their children's performances. The report shows that while the decline in arts opportunities and participation has been worst for the poor and minorities, the measured decline is true for all children in the US. That decline has had tragic effect on our nation's schools, which are widely considered to be in a state of crisis.

I've modified the scaffolding drawing slightly to show the relationship between the child's experience and the sloyd principle of movement of attention from the known to the unknown, which is not a static relationship but dynamic, continuously unfolding and made new. The arts are not just the arts, but form the 4th leg of the scaffold by providing the core of the child's experience. You cannot successfully whittle a stick without becoming engaged in the close and direct observation of physical reality, and thus crafts, are at the core of science and scientific process. Each and every manipulation of material reality offers the potential for the engagement in scientific method. One of the first publications of the London Royal Society was Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, his so called Book of Trades, providing those who launched the scientific revolution an understanding of how tradesmen shaped physical reality into useful form, thus providing early scientists the necessary means to create the tools of scientific investigation. The integration of children into crafts is their foundation in science. And what is it about that simple thing that our educational administrators and politicians seem to not understand?

Building a successful scaffold to engage the child's attention in learning is dependent on the child's engagement in the first place through continuity of experience. Making a connection from a child's own experience to the inquiry at hand is what lures his attention onwards connecting his or her own reflective internal dialog to classroom participation. If a teacher wants students to follow a lecture into greater knowledge, he or she must connect with what they already know. If we want to develop scientists in college, we'd better give children a start making beautiful and useful objects in elementary and middle school, or they just won't be ready for the emotional engagement and intellectual rigor involved in science. The following is from the NEA report:

A small but growing body of research has shown that arts education is associated with the development of dispositions and inclinations that scaffold learning in general, reaching well beyond the arts to a broad range of positive cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes. Some studies have found that arts learning has a more significant effect on low-income student achievement than it does on the academic performance of more privileged students, and that arts education is an effective pathway to deeper engagement and success in school for students who are at the greatest risk of academic failure. Some research has shown that arts education can have significant influence on student achievement, even when measured by the narrow standard of improving test scores.

Please let me know if any of this is useful to you.

Make, fix and create. DIY/TIY. Your children will most likely not get the arts and crafts they need in their schooling.

Just in case anyone has any further doubts about the relationship between the arts and science, consider this: "Processes of metaphor are functional in the generation of new hypotheses" -Donald A. Schön

a third leg

Yesterday I made a presentation to the CSS high school economics class to offer an overview of self-employment. Today I am shipping work to a gallery and helping to design a product for the economics class to make and sell as a means of making their lessons hands-on.

If one leg of the scaffold is technology, the tools available for the child to advance learning, and another leg the teacher or mentor, in position to support and encourage growth, the third is that of the school culture. The culture of a school either supports independent inquiry, or not. An atmosphere of inquiry in which each child is encouraged to reflect on ideas, and form opinions of his or her own, and then test those ideas in physical and cultural reality is essential for learning at its most efficient and engaging levels. If our hopes for our children are that they become life-long learners, the commencement of inquiry and investigation are essential to their success.

If you read here very long you will discover that I repeat myself. Sorry. But it seems that most people at some point in their lives or after they are done with their lives are remembered for simple reductionist formulas that few others may fully understand. I asked my 7th and 8th grade students if they knew who Albert Einstein was. One said, E=MC² but couldn't explain the theory, and another said, "wild hair." And so it is. When I'm gone, and have been sifted down to a few particles of bone and ash, I hope just a few will remember the strategic implementation of the hands... And so I keep repeating a few things to hone the edge of my chisel, that it may be brought to a very sharp point and cut clean and deep into the wood.

An atmosphere of inquiry is not the point of most schooling. There is a current political debate on whether or not evolution or creationism should be taught in schools. But teaching of dogma is a hollow mockery of the atmosphere of discovery that our children need in order to become creative problem solvers in the coming age.

And so I repeat, once again, the words of Charles H. Hamm, Mind and Hand, 1886, on the role of the hands in the process of discovery.

"It is easy to juggle with words, to argue in a circle, to make the worse appear the better reason, and to reach false conclusions which wear a plausible aspect. But it is not so with things. If the cylinder is not tight, the steam engine is a lifeless mass of iron of no value whatever. A flaw in the wheel of the locomotive wrecks the train. Through a defective flue in the chimney the house is set on fire. A lie in the concrete is always hideous; like murder, it will out. Hence it is that the mind is liable to fall into grave errors until it is fortified by the wise counsel of the practical hand."

The human hand is constantly seeking the truth and thereby finding it. By leaving laboratory science and wood shop and the arts outside of education, we have diminished our children in both character and intellect, and diminished human culture.

The following video is long but useful in terms of a conversation from earlier in the week on the importance of making mistakes. A culture of inquiry and investigation provides the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them.

Make, fix and create.