how nuts and bolts work...

Rudy, at my local ACE hardware store was telling me yesterday that folks are getting dumber all the time. He's had customers who've not known how nuts and bolts work... not known that they must to be aligned and turned in a particular direction in order for them to fit together. He has observed customers (more than one) in states of obvious frustration trying to push nuts and bolts together and offered, "Here, let me help with that." He says that they are then amazed at what he's accomplished. Intellectual incompetence has become a subject of conversation among clerks at the store.

"Lefty loosey and righty tighty," is a thing some folks have been taught to help them remember how nuts and bolts go together.  I had never heard that until a couple years ago, but it is a way for those who did not have the opportunity growing up with tools and with making and fixing things to gain a rudimentary verbal understanding of the way the majority of nuts and bolts works. I never needed words to explain how nuts and blots work, as I had been taking things apart and putting things together since before I could talk.

A lack of understanding of how things are made and how to fix things has ramifications far beyond just how things fit together. For instance there was the man who wanted to take his family on a float trip on our local river. He asked, "Let me get this straight. We get in the canoes here, and (pointing upstream) come out there?" "No," local guide Ernie assured him. "This is a real river.  I have to take you five miles by road, you'll get in canoes, and after following the river for several hours you will arrive here." The man thought the real river was like an amusement ride at Silver Dollar City or some such. Should a man as dumb and out of touch from a practical understanding of real life as that be allowed to take his family in a canoe? Perhaps not.

How have we have become so technologically proficient and technologically stupid at the very same time?

Part of the problem has to do with education and part has to do with parenting. Parents can hardly wait to put their iPhones and iPads and other such devices in the hands of their kids. This violates a basic premise of Educational Sloyd, that learning move from the simple to the more complex. We get kids involved with fancified technology before they've mastered a simple and fundamental understanding of reality. Complex things can distract and entertain and we mistake that for learning. Having misinterpreted children's ease of engagement with technology as being a leg up on things, we neglect the need that children have to begin their understanding of the universe with their own hands-on exploration of it. Making and fixing things can play a big part in that.

In schools we violate another principle of Sloyd. Learning should start with the concrete and move to the abstract. If you look at the syllabus for any given course, at nearly any school, at nearly every grade level you will find that it begins with broad understanding and only later attempts to lead students into deeper levels. Try to become a teacher and you'll be tested by boring classes long before you stand in front of one on your own. In contrast, when you begin with the concrete and advance toward the abstract, children are led on a path of discovery. Even when they discover that which is already known, the mapping of that discovery in actual experiences recorded in their  bodies, minds and brains, anchors the understanding of abstract principles so that they can be used in even deeper and more abstract understanding.

Joe sent this link to a book on Knife Work in the School Room by George Baldwin. Can you imagine putting knives in the hands of kids? At Clear Spring School, kids have been carving with knives safely for years.

Today in the wood shop I'll be helping my apprentice and working on boxes. I leave on Sunday for Marc Adams School for my class in box making.

Make, fix and create...