the relevance of sloyd

Yesterday I met with staff at the Clear Spring School and mentioned Sloyd, the system of woodworking education from which I draw inspiration. I also received notice concerning a paper published in Sweden by Marcus Samuelson on following and leading in a Sloyd Classroom. https://www.academia.edu/11406017/Followership_and_leadership_in_different_sorts_of_sloyd_practices

When Educational Sloyd was first developed in Sweden and Finland, children were generally homogeneous in their prior experiences. For instance, children growing up on small farms all had the experience of whittling with a knife, even as young as 4 or 5 years old, and all came from common backgrounds and domestic situations with all mothers working in the home.

So it was relatively easy to set up a course of training in which all the kids in a class and of the same age would go through the same exercises at the same time and share a common interest in the work. That's not exactly the situation today. Some parents fill their children's lives with technology. Some fill their children's lives with rich experiences. Some parents may face such challenges of family survival that they have no resources for either.

These days, children starting out in any field of subject will be all over the place in level of prior experience upon which to base further study, and all over the place in terms of interest, also based in large part upon prior experience. And so the first principle of educational Sloyd, that of starting with the interests of the child takes on even greater relevance and importance today.

It would seem improbable today for academic educators to arrive at the conclusion that there would be anything of importance that they might learn from manual arts. That was also the case in the early days when school administrators insisted that there was no time for concrete learning, that hands on work took too much time away from necessary academic pursuits. The truth is that when a proper foundation in reality is secured, academic subjects are made easier, their relevance is better established and the kids are refreshed and energized to actually learn in short order.

We now have the new woodworking studio at the Clear Spring School, in our new Phyllis Poe Hands on Learning Center, ready to classes to begin in the new semester starting next week.

In the meantime, educators would sere themselves well by learning the basic philosophy of Educational Sloyd. Start with the interests of the child. Move in close increments from the easy to the more difficult, from the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complex and from the concrete to the abstract.

Make, fix, create, and allow for all children to learn lifewise.