moving beyond drones and parasites

Making a wooden travel map of Arkansas

Yesterday in the wood shop at Clear spring School, Oen worked on his boomerang (and had to run outside to test it several times), Keelie made necklaces for friends, and my other students made tools for mineral prospecting during their upcoming trip across Arkansas. My upper level students worked on their box guitars. In the wood shop I have not been practicing "Sloyd," per se, but am reliant on the Theory of Educational Sloyd. As I mentioned yesterday, it takes a certain mental maturity to move from the concrete to the abstract, as documented by Piaget.

We must stimulate and not stifle children's activity, and set it pleasantly coursing along the channel which will lead to habits of work. "The child is father of the man," and if we would get rid of the drones and parasites in society, we must teach children not only to work, but to love work. As work, then, is necessary both for our individual and social comfort, it is important that the work should be done through love of itself, and not through love of adventitious aids, since one who does not love any particular work for its own sake, cannot do it in a right spirit or in the best possible manner. Now, one great advantage of Sloyd is that we find it is a subject which is enjoyed on account of its own intrinsic merits, and needs no extraordinary incentives to urge the scholar to pursue it. No rewards are needed, no extra tasks are imposed as punishments; but, on the contrary, if from any cause punishment is necessary, strange to say, a part of the Sloyd time is taken off, and the pupil, suspended from his work, is sent home earlier than usual—a proceeding he regards as a severe punishment. The prejudice against manual work is being surmounted: children love it in spite of the ban of society, which sentiment has first to be overcome.

The Presidential primary process in the US has me considering the relationship between the concrete and abstract. Our schooling, being focused on "right" answers and being bogged down in too much information does far too little to introduce students to the deeper complexities that are inherent in real life and in real issues. Schooling is largely an oversimplification. And so, fear becomes the most useful tool through which politicians play upon and manipulate the "drones and parasites" who are incapable of sifting through complex and abstract thought. If one realizes that the ability to work with abstraction is a thing that comes at a particular stage of mental development (as described by Piaget), and that all students do not arrive at that moment of development at the same time, and that if that window of development is squelched, you end up with an overwhelming lack of intellectual maturity in the general populace, particularly with regard to the ability to process abstract thought. (Duh.)

Today I am working on a proposal for next year's ISACS conference that I am basing on one I made in Finland in 2008, "Tools, Hands, and the Expansion of Intellect." In the wood shop, students will work on their box guitars.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the chance of learning likewise.

a stone from a gravesite.

 The following is from Susan Blow's Symbolic Education, describing the profound effect Pestalozzi had on the development of humane schooling.

Pestalozzi lets us into the secret of his life and work when he says, "Through my heart I am what I am." He was an educator because he was a philanthropist. He pleaded for universal education because he saw therein the only effective means of lessening human misery. As he tells us in the Song of the Swan, he "desired at first nothing else than to render the ordinary means of instruction so simple as to permit of their being employed in every family." Searching for the elements of particular branches of instruction, he was led to ask what were the prime elements of all knowledge. Finding in number, form, and words the "alphabet of knowing," he sought to supplement it by an "alphabet of doing," but in the attempt to find the elements of technical skill he was confessedly a failure. From the search for the elements of knowledge and skill there was an easy transition to the thought of the germinal activities of mind and to the definition of education as the "development of inherent powers." Finally, enlightened by the endeavor "to psychologize education," Pestalozzi perceived that "the forces of the heart, faith and love, do for immortal man what the root does for the tree," and that "the center and essential principle of education is not teaching, but love."

You will likely not find any of the current crop of educational reformers speaking in such ways. But I think one might see in this quote the profound effect that Pestalozzi had. Otto Salomon kept a stone from Pestalozzi's gravesite on his desk as a reminder of how schooling must be made to work in order to be most effective.

I am trying to get to a point of explaining the profound relationship between the concrete and the abstract. The stone on the desk (just as I keep a stone from Salomon's gravesite on my own) is a concrete symbol of a whole lot more.

But let us take Oen as an example. He wants to make a boomerang, and I helped him to assemble the outward shape of the thing. How, then, can he shape the edges to bring it from a rough form to one that sustains flight? I'm directing him to look very closely at a boomerang that works, and not roll his eyes when I try to explain the principles of aerodynamics.

We are near always distracted by the concrete, and neglect to look deeper. For example, when studying Educational Sloyd people see the model series, all carefully arranged and executed (either poorly or with skill) and overlook the underlying exercises that are never illustrated in such concrete form.  By focusing on the underlying exercises, consciously or unconsciously, Salomon had applied himself to developing Pestalozzi's alphabet of doing.

The failure to comprehend abstraction, and the failure to go deeper into our understanding of things is the basic error of our civilized population. And that, my friends, is used to enslave populations.

In the woodshop today we will be making cigar box guitars, boomerangs, and tools for rock prospecting. The photos above are of my first one string "panjo," a near useless instrument in my own hands, but one that might provide some fun for others. The idea of it was to demonstrate techniques and experimental process.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.

the education of Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle wrote his condemnation of education as "Tenfelsdrockh's Accounting of his Education":

My Teachers were hide-bound pedants, without knowledge of man’s nature, or boy’s; or of aught save their lexicons and quarterly account-books. Innumerable dead vocables (no dead language, for they themselves knew no language) they crammed into us, and called it fostering the growth of mind. How can an inanimate, mechanical gerund-grinder, the like of whom will, in a subsequent century, be manufactured at Nurnberg, out of wood and leather, foster the growth of anything; much less of mind, which grows, not like a vegetable, by having its roots littered with etymological compost, but like a spirit, by mysterious contact of spirit. Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought! How shall he give kindling, in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt out to a dead grammatical cinder? The Hinterschlag professors knew syntax enough; and of the human soul thus much; that it had a faculty called memory, and could be acted upon through the muscular integument by the application of birch rods.

Alas, so it is every where; so will it ever be, till the hodman is discharged, or reduced to hod-bearing, and an architect is hired, and on all hands fitly encouraged; till communities and individuals discover, not without surprise, that fashioning the souls of men by knowledge can rank on a level with blowing their bodies to pieces by gun-powder; that with generals and fieldmarshals for killing, there should be world honored Dignitaries, and were it possible, true God-ordained Priests, for teaching. But as yet, though the soldier wears openly, and even parades his butchering tool, no where, as far as I have traveled, did the school-master make show of his instructing-tool; nay, were he to walk abroad with birch girt on thigh, as if he therefore expected honor, would not, among the lighter classes, a certain levity be excited? – Thomas Carlyle

I think you can see why I like colorful old texts. You have to work at them at least a bit to discern their meanings. Can you visualize a mechanical gerund-grinder? What a completely unlovely and useless machine that would be. Would it not be better to have teachers inspired toward more creative usefulness? Is there a reason that a man who teaches poetry, not be a potter as well, drawing his metaphors from the wheel and from the clay, just so? That what he teaches be drawn too, from the inspiration of real life? Today in the wood shop at Clear Spring School, we will continue making box guitars. I am working on my third guitar and a "panjo."

In the meantime, we have most of the details worked out for my week of woodworking with the Portland Woodworking Guild from March 18 through March 25. I will supply contact information for anyone wishing to attend.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the joy of learning likewise.

Ted Sizer

In 1984, Ted Sizer published his classic book, Horace's Dilemma, that explored the American high school experience. Unfortunately, educational policy makers chose to push things in the least appropriate direction as they have often done.

"Schools value strictly orderly thinking. The computer, with its special form of algorithmic "reasoning," reinforces this predilection. Some adults in schools dismiss all other kinds of thinking as playing around making mudpies. For them, intuition and imagination are not really serious pursuits. The trial-and-error procedures involved are too messy. Accordingly, they get short shrift in far too many schools, with sad costs to the individuals and their communities."–Theodore Sizer, Horace's Dilemma, 1984

One thing you learn from woodworking and through the application of mind (and hands) to the real world is that materials may be used to advantage as in planing with the grain, or to distinct disadvantage when one forces one's way through against the grain. So some sensitivity and application of attention is required.

A friend of mine is an antique dealer and had invited me to examine a chair he assured me was made in the sixteenth century. I asked if I could turn it over and look underneath, at which time it was revealed to me that it could not have been made at such an early date. The stock underneath had a very large chunk of wood torn out by a power plane, whereas no craftsman with normal strength could have done such a thing and only by purposely going against the grain with inordinate force. The amount of strength required to remove such a large chunk would have been huge and unavailable in the time before power driven tools.

So schools intended for the efficient delivery of information run roughshod and amok on children and their sensitivities. A close examination of our kids and their attitudes about learning and about schooling may reveal that they have been powered through the process of schooling without sensitivity to their grain.

In the illustration above, you will note the craftsman's posture. He aligns himself carefully, and squares himself and the tool to the stock. What if our teachers had time for such careful alignment?

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the capacity to learn likewise.

machine run amok

Last night, they held yet another largest ever Powerball jackpot drawing. It again failed to produce a winning ticket, even though millions of tickets were sold. Now the next jackpot will be well over 1 billion dollars, so you know once again, Americans will be hoping that the machine delivers to them in the most personal of ways... showering them with money they have done nothing to earn.

The lottery is a devilishly devised way to get people to acquiesce to a system run by an elite. My wife asked me how they know there were no winners without allowing time for winners to come forward with their tickets. I assured her that the machine knows.

In school, I have one girl who, having made a bow and arrows, insists there is nothing more I can get her to do with wood. That may be shortsighted of her, and she is abundantly skilled, but I have allowed her to take an alternative course that is more interesting for her and that supports the interests of the class at large. She has become our story reader. Just as cigar makers would hire someone to read and keep his employees engaged and alert, my student is reading to her class.

The current text is E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops." Published in 1909, it should be read by all those who've become overly dependent on digital technology, not only because of the precariousness of our predicament, but because of the insight it offers into the human soul. The lead character Kuno, who had become bored with the machine, had discovered to his complete amazement that "man is the measure," which is one of those things we should be teaching in school. But in order to know your own place in the measuring of things you have to get up from your desk. If you look at the use of standardized testing and the machine at the core of standardized education, you will see a direct parallel between this modern time, and that which Kuno  in the story hopes to escape. Without wood shop, without music, without the arts, without the hands to test principles in mathematics, history and science, we might as well just prop everyone up in similar chairs and sell them lottery tickets, that they might hope at some time in their lives to be delivered from the machine.

The following is from Susan E. Blow who founded the first public school kindergarten in the US.

The greatest mistakes in education are rooted in the failure to recognize and conform to the different stages of natural development. Educational theorists are constantly pointing out this error; educational practice is constantly repeating it. Notwithstanding all that has been said and written, we still make knowledge our idol, and continue to fill the child's mind with foreign material, under the gratuitous assumption that at a later age he will be able, through some magic transubstantiation, to make it a vital part of his own thought. This is like loading his stomach with food which he can not digest, under the delusive hope that he may be able to digest it when he is a man. It is forcing the mind to move painfully forward under a heavy weight, instead of running, leaping and flying under the incitement of its own energy and the allurement of its own perceived ideal. The attempt to force a premature activity of reason can result only in repulsion of his sympathies and the stultification of his mind. – Symbolic Education, Susan E. Blow, 1894.

The preceding was written in an attempt by Blow to explain and promote the educational philosophy of Friedrich Froebel, and if you have your wits about you, you may notice that Froebel and Blow had discussed stages of learning and development long before Piaget was even born. Thus it was in the early days... Educators made profound observations that were thence soundly ignored, and educational policy makers developed schooling that had a complete disregard for the developmental issues facing each child. If a single child was run over by a subway each day, the nation would be clamoring for change. But the fact that huge numbers of children are run over in school each day by educational policies run amok, seems to be of no concern at all.

A friend of mine, Mario, reminds me that very few educators will defend the machine that they serve daily. All appear to see the chinks in it and the damage it does. And so, perhaps I need to work a bit on clarifying my proposal. We need to push back on the machine. Remove it from our lives for extended periods, and reclaim the development of mind that comes when attention is cultivated and applied.

The drawing above is for a class I will teach in Portland in March.

Make, fix, create and extend to others the chance of learning likewise.

mentioned...

My Wisdom of the Hands program was mentioned in an article in Independent School Magazine, the quarterly publication of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS). Clear Spring School is a member of the NAIS through our regional affiliate, ISACS, Independent Schools of the Central States, the association of independent schools that grants our accreditation.  The issue of Independent School that contains the article is Winter, 2016, and I was alerted to the article by readers who had found their way to the blog by reading it.

In any case, the article is by clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel who asks, "Is Anxiety in Young Boys the New Normal." In this blog, I have brought up many times the damage we do to young boys in what has become traditional schooling. The article states, "Boys long to run errands, patrol distant fields, hunt in the bush... and if denied this opportunity trouble awaits." Comenius had said nearly the same thing in the 17th century and the most effective educational policymakers have spent the better part of three centuries ignoring what can be easily observed without a PhD in education.  John Amos Comenius, was considered the father of modern pedagogy (the science of education) and observed:

Boys ever delight in being occupied in something for the youthful blood does not allow them to be at rest. Now as this is very useful, it ought not to be restrained, but provision made that they may always have something to do. Let them be like ants, continually occupied in doing something, carrying, drawing, construction and transporting, provided always that whatever they do be done prudently. They ought to be assisted by showing them the forms of all things, even of playthings; for they cannot yet be occupied in real work, and we should play with them.

The most important point buried in Comenius' quote is the phrase, "now as this is very useful, it ought not be restrained." And the point is that our best leverage on boys learning is to make use of their most natural inclinations. There's a saying that you can't push a rope, but you sure as hell can pull one to very great effect. By ignoring the nature of boys, we create education that is destructive, ineffective and least efficient. But if we were to use their natural inclinations to our best advantage, schooling would become both efficient and undamaging.

What Mogel's article alerts members of the NAIS to is the fact, that our current model of schooling is not only ineffective as suggested by Comenius, it is destructive. And how would I know about that? I was one of those young men in an earlier time, who feeling squelched by schooling, left for school each day having hurled up my breakfast and with knots gnawing where nourishing food should have been. My own experience in the subject is "first hand." I made it through my own crisis in schooling with the help of a doctors visit to assure there was nothing physically wrong, and the counseling and support of my mother, a professional kindergarten teacher.

I could point my readers to a dozen of my blog posts on this subject. One can be found here, My Daughter Loves School. The odd thing is that educators have become more reliant on statistical modelling and standardized tests than on what they could see before their very eyes were they to look, and I find this to be disconcerting. Educational policy makers would rather sustain environments in which children must be drugged to cope, than attempt to modify a system that is torturous, ineffective and corrupt.

At school, I have been shaping guitar necks. In my home workshop, I have been applying Danish oil to boxes.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others, please, the opportunity to learn likewise.

what we know...

Those who study and have studied child development will tell you that children's bodies, muscular capacities, and minds grow and develop within  a range of what is termed "normal." For instance, and as I've mentioned many times before, if your child walks at 10 months your pediatrician will say that it's normal and not to worry (and that no particular genius is assured). If your child walks at 14 or 16 months the very same pediatrician will tell you, that too, is very normal. In fact, I can give the names of children who chose not to walk until as late as 18-24 months whose development and intelligence, and physical capacities are well within the upper side of the normal range. But when it comes to schooling, we put kids in classes and expect them to read on a clock and panic when they are not performing at "grade level."

I raise a toast to late bloomers, may we all unite against the stupidity* of American education!!!

A couple days ago, I mentioned Piage's theory of stages in child development. Student performance is in part controlled by the body/mind's capacity to engage in concrete vs. abstract learning. But the truly stupid thing is that kids are moved up or behind in class, and assumed to be stupid or smart (or are led to make the same wrongful assumptions of themselves) when there are simple developmental differences having to do with the rate of growth from level to level. For instance, the formal operational stage is not a thing all children reach automatically and magically at age 11, as though hands on a clock. Instead, it comes between the ages of 11-15, a four year span of time during which some students would inevitably be labeled by the Procrustean bed of public education as intellectually inept. If the range of walking can extend nearly a year or more, how can we possibly assume putting academic pressures to learn on children as early as third grade should be considered anything but an outrage and a crime?

This is not to say that children should not be encouraged to learn at whatever rate their current capacity might allow.  But one must never assume that any particular child might not completely surprise you with both their character and intelligence and at any time, given a reasonable chance at it. Schooling at its best (and in order to do less harm than good) must be structured to allow not only for differences in learning style, but also to accommodate variations in the developmental process.

As you noticed from yesterday's post, I have been reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden. I have to wonder why people were so smart in the 19th century and so vacuous today. Can it be that they had slightly less to think about, and so gave what they had deeper thought? And that by giving things more thought, and deeper thought, were more thoughtful and reflective about their own lives, the lives of others and the world they lived within?

It might be worth slowing down to find out. And one sure way to do that is to craft something (with your own hands) beautiful and useful, that might become treasured for a lifetime.

*Please forgive me for being so blunt. There are 39 easy-to-find synonyms for the word stupid, and I could have been more creative and perhaps less strident had I but chosen online resources to do so. I know that in speaking so bluntly I may appear both snobbish and insulting to some. But buck up and bear with. My use of the word stupid in relation to education is no more unpleasant than what hands-on learners have long suffered and endured under the oppressive grip of being "'schooled."

Yesterday in the wood shop at Clear Spring School yesterday, 7th and 8th grade students worked on box guitars, some building the bodies and some moving on to shape the necks.

In the image above, one can see that schools were not always what they are today. I take the personal risk of your disfavor by insisting that things may have gotten worse.

In one of Piaget's tests having to do with the formal operational stage, students were asked, that if they had a third eye, where would it best (and most usefully) be placed on their bodies? Students still in the concrete operational stage usually suggested at the center of the forehead. In contrast, a student in the formal operational stage, suggested it be located in the hand so that he could use it see around corners. In a sense, the hands already offer a perspective of reality that has come to be wrongly and ruthlessly ignored in schooling. Hands do see around corners and under things in ways modern educators have become stupid about.

Make, fix, create and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.

thoreau on education

Yesterday in wood shop at the Clear Spring School I had a remarkable day. Students made a buck saw of their own design from materials found in the woods and a section of old band saw blade. One make a knife ground from another piece of bandsaw blade, and my lower elementary school students made wooden Japanese style flip flops.  Other students worked on their box guitars. The last I saw Oen during the day he was running with shoes and socks off toward his parents car, wearing the wooden shoes he had made. He could not possibly be more pleased by with what he had accomplished.

The following is from Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond, one of the classics of American literature that is promoted for consumption by American high school students but ignored completely by educational policy makers.

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practiced but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month, — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rogers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers? – Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond.

And so what Thoreau is more than hinting at is that those, ALL THOSE, who are denied a hands-on education are denied learning in depth and the expenditure for that education is an enormous waste, not only for the students in their deprivation but for the culture at large.

I am talking with one of my publishers today about a short book on making cigar box guitars, and yesterday I began work on a "panjo" made from a bread pan acquired from our local thrift store.

Make, fix, create, and extend toward others the chance of learning likewise.

coping with contrivance

Yesterday in the wood shop at Clear Spring School I officially launched the project of making box guitars even though several students had taken a head start last week. My students are generally excited about it. I'm hoping to use this project to develop greater mindfulness. In order to make a box for the body of the guitar that works, corners must be cut and assembled square so the body will be flat. In order to make a guitar that offers some pleasure in playing it, the neck should be smoothly shaped to fit the hand. And so to just take a tool and whack away mindlessly without checking and rechecking may not bring satisfactory results.

I want to go back to yesterday's conversation about Piaget's formal operational stage. The simple point is that child development cuts both ways. Not only does entry to the formal operational stage allow the child to do mathematics operations in his or her head, and to engage in formulating hypotheses, it is also the culmination of years of study by the child of the environment in which it has (hopefully) used its senses to explore and make determination of the fundamental features of reality. Newly equipped to see through contrivance, and to assess the unreality of schooling, some children rebel against it. Others soldier on, propped up by support systems in the home, or by goals of attending particular colleges, all the while knowing that what they endure is little more than a game with high stakes.

For those who soldier on, as though the artificiality of schooling does not matter, we assume wrongly that the system has granted success. We assume that the damages to those who do not fit the system for one reason or another are simply the price we pay for the success of others.

But I believe the whole of our society, even those who are granted success in the system, suffer from schools in which doing nothing real is the norm. There is a real world out there, that offers greater opportunity than can be found inside the head.

Make, fix, create and extend to others the chance to learn likewise.

building to teach

Over the past few days I mentioned the need to bring skilled teaching into school, those with skilled trades to re-energize the learning environments and excite students about learning. One organization that is doing just that is Building to Teach. The primary focus of building to teach is to re-energize math learning by training teachers to build boats and engage students in the building trades. What better way can there be to learn an abstract subject than by bringing it into concrete form and making it relevant?

Building to Teach has a new website where prospective teachers and programs can sign up for on-line training. They also hold training conferences. For many of the students who benefit from Building to Teach, a singular opportunity to do something real in school can make all the difference in the world.

One thing that many educators will notice is that when children hit the ages of 11-15 all hell breaks loose in their attitudes toward schooling. These teachers may also note that that age corresponds with what Piaget called the Formal Operational Stage which

"involves an increase in logic, the ability to use deductive reasoning, and an understanding of abstract ideas. At this point, people become capable of seeing multiple potential solutions to problems and think more scientifically about the world around them."

The point here is that an increase in the use and availability of logic helps students confirm the trivialities of their learning environments. Along with the ability to understand abstract ideas comes the need to test and confirm those abstract ideas. Should it come as any surprise to American policy makers that we would have a high rate of dropouts in America? The formal operational stage places children in direct conflict with the artificiality of contrived learning. Should they not rebel? They cut the shop classes and music classes and laboratory science classes. They cut field trips, outdoor education, travel, and other means through which children might test the reality of what they are compelled to consume while sitting at desks.

Building to Teach counters that thrust. While Building to Teach is only intended to work with math at this point, it should serve as a model for all learning.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others the opportunity to learn likewise.

skills or cheap labor?

Apple CEO Tim Cook was on 60 Minutes last night (recorded), and claimed that the reason they do almost all of their manufacturing in China is that China has skilled people there that we do not. It was not the best face for him to present to his largest market. Perhaps, however, there is some uncomfortable truth to what he said that should alarm us and perhaps awaken us to do something about it. Skills, you don't get by sitting at desks, and by the time American students graduate from high school, they've spent more time sitting at desks than children anyplace else in the world, and that costs us dearly. Developing skill is not a mindless enterprise.

Another aspect of the situation is that while many American manufacturers need skilled workers, too few want to invest by helping them to develop the skills they need.

When I started the Wisdom of the Hands program in 2001, I was concerned that manual arts were no longer being taught in schools. I discovered that the problems in American education were far worse. Getting rid of shop classes was a symptom, not a cause, and the situation gave insight into an educational model run amok. Getting rid of shop classes could only seem reasonable to those who had made a fundamental error in understanding how and why children learn.

Standardized testing now drives schooling, and American manufacturers have actively supported that model even though it fails to deliver the skills they need. And then when they export jobs, they then claim that it's the skills they need (that we can't provide), not the cheap labor that drives their decision to manufacture overseas.

Children, it should be noted, have an overriding inclination to do something well, and to demonstrate for others their intelligence and skill.  Schooling should be redesigned to take advantage of that inclination by providing students the opportunity to do real things.

Make, fix, create, and extend to others a chance of learning likewise.

Beautiful, useful and that can last one's whole life

Some of my readers will remember that I was quoted from this blog at the beginning of Matt Crawford's first book"Shop Class as Soulcraft" and at the end of his third book, having to do with the child's awareness that schooling is contrived and undeserving of his full attention. The following conclusion was offered in Matt Crawford's newest book The World Beyond Your Head:

As Stowe's use of the word "undeserving" suggests, at the heart of education is the fact that we are evaluative beings. Our rational capacities are intimately tied into our emotional equipment of admiration and contempt, those evaluative responses that are inadmissible under the flattening. A young boy, let us say, admires the skill and courage of racecar drivers. This kind of human greatness may not be available to him realistically, but is perfectly intelligible to him. If he learns trigonometry, he can put himself in the service of it, for example by becoming a fabricator in the world of motor sports. He can at least imagine such a future for himself, and this is what keeps him going to school. At some point, the pleasures of pure mathematics may begin to make themselves felt and give his life a different shape. Or not. He may instead become enthralled with the beauty of a well-laid weld bead on a perfectly coped tubing joint‐like a stack of shiny dimes that has fallen over and draped itself around a curve‐and devote himself to this art. There are websites for "weld porn,” and the mere fact that this is so should be of urgent interest to educators. Education requires a certain capacity for asceticism, but more fundamentally it is erotic. Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads. –quoted with author permission,  The World Beyond Your Head. pg. 256-57

So in the face of ever increasing emphasis on standards and standardization I offer on the other hand, a solution to the problems we face in American education. Back in the days of Educational Sloyd, the nations of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were equipped with vast numbers of potential teachers of Sloyd. So it made sense for them to center development of Educational Sloyd on woodworking for the boys and needle craft for the girls. These days are different, and while Educational Sloyd was imposed in a manner in which all schools in Sweden could be working from the same model series at the same time, a renewal of American education should offer an escape from the rigidity imposed through standardized testing.

So I request the consideration of three simple standards designed to shake things up, unflatten schooling and make learning more real (and thereby more engaging) for American students. 1. Challenge every teacher to make what they teach hands-on, thereby connecting student attention to the real world. 2. Allow every student at every grade level to engage in the creation of useful beauty. 3. Prior to graduation, each student should be required to create something expressing useful beauty and of such quality that it will last their whole life long.

The simple point is to make schooling real. As I state at the top of this page, this blog is dedicated to sharing the concept that our hands are essential to learning-that we engage the world and its wonders, sensing and creating primarily through the agency of our hands. We abandon our children to education in boredom and intellectual escapism by failing to engage their hands in learning and making. So the point is not to take education back to the 19th century, but to move forward with some common sense understanding about how we learn best. And as Crawford states so clearly, "Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads."

Make, fix, create, and make it possible for others to learn likewise.

A teacher's guide

In the 1800's the political and religious elite in various Scandinavian countries had become alarmed  by the loss of agency within communities. The old things that peasant craftsmen had made for themselves for hundreds of years were being displaced by the import of cheap, well made manufactured goods. And so traditional hand-crafts were dying. Along with the loss of crafts, communities were being altered in their basic character. According to Gustaf Larsson's account, instead of making beautiful and useful things, they turned their attention to making (and consuming) brandy.

And so the introduction of Educational Sloyd was not only to increase the industrial capacity, but also to sustain Scandinavian culture, develop an ethos of craftsmanship, foster the growth of character and intelligence, and to enrich the lives of the people.

To bring Sloyd training to every school in Sweden required building a school in which teachers could be trained, so Otto Salomon, with the financial support of his rich uncle August Abrahamson, started the Sloyd teacher training school at Nääs. Then as Sloyd Training became popular in Sweden and other Scandinavian countires, students from all over the world began attending summer classes at Nääs.

It is a long story I've told many times before. The image above is one of the plates from Otto Salomon's Teachers Hand-Book Slöjd. In that book, he told what it takes to be a teacher of Sloyd, gives an overview of the teaching method, describes the tools required, the selection of appropriate woods, and goes step by step through the exercises upon which the model series were organized. The book is free at google play.

Make, fix, create, and encourage others to learn likewise.

Happy New Year 2016

On becoming a sloyd teacher, Otto Salomon said the following:

It is most important that this should be laid down once and for all, because some teachers possibly imagine that the technical skill necessary for teaching may be obtained by attending one or two sloyd courses. This is by no means the case, and the organizers of such sloyd courses are the first to understand and to insist upon the fact, that they can only aim at laying a foundation on which students may afterwards build by means of independent work. Just as little as one can learn to play on any instrument by merely taking lessons for a given time from a music teacher, can skill in the management of tools be acquired and maintained without continuous and earnest practice. The teacher who feels real interest in sloyd must therefore, on his own account, endeavor to improve in respect of technical skill, and this will prove a two-fold gain because the bodily exercise affords a healthy change form the mental work with which the time of the teacher is chiefly filled.–The Teachers Handbook of Sloyd

As we look to a new year with an understanding of what must be done, we must also ask who can do it. I can assure you that it is far easier to teach a skilled craftsman to teach woodworking than it would be to teach a trained teacher unskilled in hand work to teach woodworking. I am assisted time and time again in the classroom by having had the opportunity to understand the nature and characteristics of individual species of wood, how to sharpen tools, how to plan projects so that they offer my students some possibility of success. So, to be completely honest, what we face in restoring wood shops to schools will be an enormous challenge. What are your ideas about this? If you have none, I will proceed on my own, but would prefer to move forward with help.

Make, fix, create, and insist that others have the opportunity to learn likewise.