I have no training as a luthier, and know that real luthiers would likely look askance at my methods. So what. I'm making these things, will write about them and lead my readers into engagement with their own creativity. I don't think they'll mind.
Joseph Neef, the first to introduce Pestalozzian ideas in America, in his Plan and Method of Education says: “To unfold any faculty whatever, we must exercise it, and to exercise it we must possess means for exercising it; and these means we have in abundance. Let us but open our eyes. The whole cabinet of nature, beings and objects, animate and inanimate, obtrude themselves on us, and yet how neglected they are.”Today one of our students was waiting for a ride and watched a parade of ants. How can one but wonder in the face of such things? Does each individual ant have some degree of self-awareness? A sense of duty? Is consciousness reserved so that only humans have it? Read again, the paragraph in quotes immediately above this one. There might be some danger to the machinery of the modern industrial state if we were to consider that even an ant might be a sentient being. We might rebel in some way, discover our own higher consciousness and make something more of our lives and give something more to the lives around us.
Yesterday in the wood shop at the Clear Spring School, I began making gates for the school garden, and my lower elementary school students whittled and one made a wooden light saber. Today in the wood shop, my middle school and high school students will work on finishing their box guitars, my upper elementary school students will finish their bird houses. I'll have guests visiting this morning to learn more about my program.
Make, fix, create, and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.
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