nature my college.

"Nature," said Froebel, "was my college, the tree my principal, the nursery my university, and children my professors." According to Froebel, the child was not born to think but to do and be active, and in that we have the opportunity to observe and to learn. Froebel learned about education by watching children learn.  Children are equipped by nature for that task. Since children have not changed, we might follow the same course of education ourselves, learning both from children and from those who have made a life's work of watching children learn.

Educational policy makers devised a two track model in which one track was to keep its hands clean, and engage in purity of thought leading to college while the rest did the dirty manual work of keeping society strong and moving in the right direction. This was described by Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, as follows:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."— Woodrow Wilson

Would we not be better served by a model in which all were called in schools to make objects of useful beauty, building not only things, but in building those things the character and intelligence of our communities and our nation?

Make, fix and create...