A Kindergarten demonstration project

The interesting thing about higher education is that the only forms of intelligence that are promoted though the system to its highest levels are academics and one of the great shortcomings is the exclusion of the training of the hands and body on an equal footing with the mind alone.

I find it interesting still that Teacher's College in New York, a sister of Columbia University, was founded to teach teachers to teach the manual arts. The recognition was there then that the hands and mind were integral to the development of character and intellect. https://wisdomofhands.blogspot.com/2009/11/visit-to-teachers-college-columbia.html And surely trained hands are still essential to the of training minds, unless you are aiming toward perpetuating useless intellectual foolishness and selfish elitism.

Right across the street from Columbia University and just a few blocks from Teachers College, Union Seminary and Barnard you'll find St. John the Divine Cathedral, a wonderful place left unfinished. Imagine a program in which students were allowed to train their hands and minds in harmony and at the same time. It's a shame the administrative minds in the neighborhood surrounding St. John the Divine cannot stretch that far.

Early proponents of manual arts understood that to teach all to create useful and beautiful objects was an important component in democracy, as it helped to sustain the shared sense of the dignity of human labor. What would happen if students of one of the world's great universities were to enter their intellectual engagements reinforced and illuminated through the shared framework of humanity that only the hands can provide?

Yesterday in wood shop my Kindergarten students made a "demonstration" project based on Froebel's Kindergarten gift number 2. My instruction was to follow as follows. See one, do one, teach one. They enjoyed the project, which consisted of a stand and a cylinder hanging on a string. A dowel can be used to set the cylinder in motion and as it spins the shape blurs into a spherical form. If you color the ends of the cylinder, the colors blend and merge into new colors just as they would if mixed on a pallet. It will be a lovely thing for them to be able to demonstrate to family and friends.

One of my first grade boys asked his grandmother what she used to make in wood shop. She explained that she didn't have wood shop when she was his age. He said, "I'm so sorry."

Make, fix, grow and create...