carrot clarinet...

The following is from Vandewalker's book, the Kindergarten in American Education.

"Throughout all the long hundred years in which they had been building a nation, Americans had shown themselves children of utility, not of beauty. Everything they used show only the plain unstudied lines of practical serviceability. The things to be seen at Philadelphia (Exposition of 1876), gathered from all over the world, awakened them to a new sense of form and beauty. Men knew afterward that that had been the dawn of an artistic renaissance in America, which was to put her architects and artists alongside the modern masters of beauty, and redeem the life of the people from its ugly severity."-- Woodrow Wilson.

Vandewalker, in her book (1923), told that the rise of Kindergartens in America was first enabled by an understanding of the need for drawing and manual arts in schooling. These subjects demonstrated that student activity was an essential part of learning. The idea that schooling should involve a professor standing at the head of the class and lecturing to the mind numbed was first tested at the Oswego Normal School where Dr. E. A. Sheldon had come under the influence of Pestalozzi's ideas. Sadly, policy makers moved in the opposite direction of late advocating a return to recitation and lecture, which are easier to manage but less effective than lessons which involve students doing real things. You can see that the rise of Kindergarten and the rise of manual arts training, was hand in hand developmental process, with each bringing forth the other. The video above is fun. Sadly, you cannot repeat the making of a carrot clarinet without having a saxophone mouthpiece. Hopefully, he'll show us how to make that next. The laser engraving of the insides of box lids was completed yesterday, so today I'll be hinging and assembling boxes. Make fix, and create...