economic purposes vs. more

Mike Rose has offered an editorial, Race to the Top of What? Education Is About More Than Jobs I am reminded of the time period in which the Smith Hughes Act was signed into law and Americans began our adventure in publicly funded Vocational Training. (1917) While we can sing "the times they are a-changin'," history does tend towards repeating itself. And this is all particularly relevant as our nation considers a plan to give 10th grade students a chance to test out of high school to attend community college. Rose's editorial raises the question, "is learning about jobs, or is it also about other things?" And if school is about jobs, what kind of job can schools do about jobs? The following is from Rose's editorial.

Vocational education provides a cautionary tale of what a strictly economic focus can yield.

When vocational education was being formulated in the first decades of the last century, some proponents had an egalitarian conception of a curriculum that integrated the manual and mental to foster intellectual, social and civic development. But as VocEd materialized, much of that ideal was lost to a strictly functional job-training curriculum that, ironically, wasn’t very successful at preparing students for the new work of the day. A major effort of recent reforms of vocational education (now called career and technical education) has been to recapture some of those earlier goals. The best education for work is one that is broader than job preparation, that emphasizes literacy, quantitative reasoning, problem solving, creativity—and that gets at all of this through a range of human expression, from mathematics to the arts.

So what kind of job can community colleges do in the important parts of education that aren't just about jobs? These are the same questions asked among participants in the early part of the 20th century. At the 1904 and 1905 meetings of the Eastern Manual Training Association, one of the hot topics was whether what many saw as the formative goals of manual training could be put aside to fulfill economic requirements. So we see the same old same old, played out in discussions throughout the land.

I am in awe of the discussions taking place about American education. There is a great deal of enthusiasm for the subject, with so many divergent opinions. I have been reading books, lots of them. And yet, the ones that have the greatest appeal for me were the ones written in the 19th century, when there was a gentleness and commonsense in our education of children. American education has become so complicated, the pros and cons of discussion going on and on. It makes me wonder whether I can have a voice in it all, and whether craftsman from Arkansas can get a word in edgewise.

But on a very personal level, we all know that learning is about growing in breadth of thought and capacity of action, or as Rose concludes in his essay,

What is telling is that even in programs explicitly targeted to economic advancement—community college certification programs, for example—there is typically much more going on than job preparation. Students report that they are going back to school to be better able to raise their kids, or to feel better about themselves, or to open up new options—economic options, but intellectual and social ones as well. In fact, one of the things that strike me about working with adults returning to school is how often the experience leads them to re-evaluate themselves, to see themselves in a new light.

The way we express the purpose of schooling shapes our collective definition of the educated person. If we want our youth to thrive and stay in school, the goal of all current school reforms, then we need an education policy that embodies the full range of reasons people go to school in a free society.

Thanks Richard Bazeley for alerting me to Mike Rose's essay.

Mike Rose's blog

Author and educator Mike Rose has written a number of books exploring human intelligence as it is variously applied. He states:

As I’ve been arguing during the year of this blog’s existence—and for some time before—we tend to think too narrowly about intelligence, and that narrow thinking has affected the way we judge each other, organize work, and define ability and achievement in school. We miss so much.

This post is one that I know my readers will find illuminating.

surgeon, carpenter, plumber?

This week, Mike Rose's Blog explores the procedures used by a surgeon doing a laparoscopic gallbladder operation and draws comparisons with a plumber or carpenter at work. This blog post is excerpted from his book Mind at Work. His point:

We as a society have developed a popular vocabulary of work that leads us to make easy but substantial distinctions between work of body and brain, of white collar and blue—these days expressed as the new knowledge work versus old-style industry and service work.

While these distinctions surely have meaning in terms of status and income, they may be less definitive than we think and may blind us to commonalities in the way different kinds of work actually get done at the level of immediate, day-to-day practice. We gain, I believe, a richer appreciation of competent performance, a broader sense of it, by observing, for example, the sequencing and pacing of tasks in a range of both blue-collar and white occupational contexts, or the strategic combining of the senses in service of both the tradesperson's and the surgeon's diagnosis.

My own point, with which I believe Mike Rose would agree:

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.

We each are diminished intellectually, emotionally and culturally when our hands are left untrained and ill prepared for engagement in physical reality. But there are simple remedies. Cook, plant, sew, make, make music, nurture, care for others through the conscious engagement of the hands.

The photo above shows this morning's process on making tables. I used a dado blade in the table saw to begin shaping the end stretchers for the table tops.

failings and grace

This morning I listened to parts of an interview with Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work, about his new book, Possible Lives, the Promise of Public Education in America, on the hopeful, grace-filled, elements of American Education. Mike reminds that while education in America has been taking an incredible beating in the press and by American politicians and corporate CEOs either trying to score points or make big bucks, there are some wonderful things happening in the lives of children and teachers in schools. There are schools that work and teachers that make them work, and if we look toward what has been demonstrated as possible, the chance of meaningful change is brought to the fore. Mike finds public schools and teachers that can inspire and lead the way. From the interview:

"As we continue to emphasize -- almost exclusively -- the economic, vocational purpose of schooling, and we tie that to a particular technocratic kind of assessment, that is, the standardized, high stakes test, we end up with an education system that narrows, rather than expands, and certainly doesn’t befit a democratic society...We know from research that particular subject areas are de facto being addressed less in our schools: the arts, music, literature, history, some of the social studies."

If you look back, the same dilemma in American education has been with us for some time. I was reminded of this by recent reports on the decline of engineering in the US, related to our failure to launch enough young engineers to fill the positions available for them. Calvin Woodward of Washington University was considered one of the two fathers of manual arts in the US, and like John Runkle at MIT, started his manual training program because his engineering students, most deficient in  practical hands-on experience, were coming to university unprepared for success. It was a situation very much like today, and so it is worthwhile to look back. (Though very few are looking in that direction.)

In Dec. 1885, Dr. Woodward spoke at a public gathering in Boston at the invitation of various leading citizens including the mayor, the superintendent of schools, the governor of Massachusetts, and the president of MIT. He quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools and colleges and recitation room from ten to fifteen years, and come out at the last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or eyes, or our arms... In a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common sense still goes on."

And so Dr. Woodward stated the problem that is still with us today. He also proposed a simple one line epigram for educational reform. He said, "My educational creed I put into six words, Put the whole boy to school." As you and I know from our own learning, where the hands are engaged, the heart and mind are also engaged and the whole boy (and girl) follows. From the vantage point offered by our human hands, we know where the arts, music, manual arts, laboratory science, field trips, camping, nature studies and so many other fields of human adventure fit in American schooling and why they are too important to continue to neglect. Neglect the hands on the other hand, and intelligence and educational enthusiasm wither on the vine.

Make, fix and create.

the mind at work

Esteemed writer and educator Mike Rose passed away a few days ago. He's a person whose writing I admired, as he made clear that the work of labor was not devoid of intellect as so many in the upper echelons of management have wanted us to believe. 

Mike's mother was a waitress and he had marveled at how she kept straight all the various wants and needs of each person at each table in the restaurant where she worked. His writing was to remind us of the dignity and value of work. His seminal book, The Mind at Work has been on my shelves for years and I've referred to him many times in conversation and in my blog, Wisdomofhands.blogspot.com  I thank Mike for his contributions to education and to my own thoughts.

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools and colleges and recitation room from ten to fifteen years, and come out at the last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or eyes, or our arms... In a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common sense still goes on."—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make, fix and create... 

from the stick to the handle

Leakey discovered evidence of man the tool maker over a million years old. What sets man apart from the other tool using animals, like crows and monkeys, isn't the use of tools, but the making of them. A number of animals of different species use sticks to probe nests for bugs and honey. And while man has been making tools for over a million years, it is only in the last 35,000 that man has been using sticks to make handles to increase tool force and accuracy and extend tool range. Two hundred years ago man began his even greater application of force to his tools through the use of steam and internal combustion, and in the last 50 years, tools have been directed toward the elimination of necessary skill and attention from human processes. And so, you could say that the history of tool making really got interesting when we learned to make handles for them. And the making of handles signaled an explosion of human intellect, just as the child's movement in grip from the head of the hammer to the end of the shaft, signals a concurrent expansion of intellect.

John Grossbohlin sent the following in reference to Mike Rose's essay which I referred to in an earlier post:

"What I saw in Rose's words, more specifically "The best education for work is one that is broader than job preparation, that emphasizes literacy, quantitative reasoning, problem solving, creativity..." is reminiscent of the apprenticeship relationships of 18th century colonial America. The masters we obligated to not only teach the arts and mysteries of the trade but to also teach math, writing, and business skills. This was also the experience my father had as an apprentice tool and die maker in the late '50s.

"In a visit to the Kingston IBM plant Tom Watson Jr told the assembled tool and die makers that they were the future of the company... The young guys didn't understand that, they felt they were tool and die makers only. A mid-level manager put it all in context by saying that "you don't think IBM spent all the money on you [to train you] so you would just be tool and die makers do you?" Over time all those highly trained workers went on to be the innovative problem solvers and decision makers that grew IBM in the 70s and 80s... by then IBM started buying their talent on the open market instead of growing their own."

And so, you can see the relationship between tool making, and problem solving as a foundation for such abstractions as managing one of the world's largest and most successful business coporations.

I am going to be on the subject of tools for a time. Get a grip. Put a handle on that thing. The images above and below are of a stone tool, found in my garden and shaped by some long deceased craftsman to fit my hand. It would have been used for softening hides, cracking nuts, or perhaps making acorn flour, with the human arm's own leverage. Our landscaper found them for both left and right. They were quickly shaped and discarded when their work was done.



Still on the same subject, tomorrow the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade students will continue making hobbit puppets, and it is interesting to observe which students want theirs to have the stick at the back to control it for performance. The first graders, still getting used to having a handle on things are reticent. They want to hold it more tightly in their own hands... Just as they want to hold a hammer close to the head. Handles being one of mankind's near recent inventions, take a while to enter the developmental landscape.

Tapered and marked for mortises

I have tapered and marked the legs for mortises. Cutting mortises will be the next step, and as they are done in pairs, left and right, the marking is a careful task.

I have continued to read Mike Rose's book, Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, https://amzn.to/47szxo9 and it should be noted that in addition to this book, Rose was a noted authority on writing. And for some, the urge to write emerges when one has something to say. Looking at a blank paper in sixth grade while the teacher stands over you expecting you to perform won't do.

We do not all mature at the same pace and many have discovered their inclination to write when they've matured enough to have something meaningful to say. While the teacher stands there putting the pressure on, relax.

Make, fix and create...

Of course, Clear Spring School isn't the only school in America doing what we do in the woodshop. The School In Rose Valley has a program led by Mike Nowell

Mike describes the hidden value of woodworking education. What he says applies to children of all ages.

The Hidden Agenda of Preschool Shop
by Mike Nowell

Visitors, prospective parents and new school parents are often taken aback by the thought of three and four year olds engaging in woodworking. Their general focus on either the novel "cuteness" of small children plying full-sized tools or the potential dangers of same can distract them from seeing that there is quite a bit more going on in the program than children learning how to nails together pieces of scrap wood. While the following list of the program's intentional structures and rules teamed with the explicit and implicit messages and lessons conveyed to preschool children is considerably less than exhaustive, my hope is that it provides a glimpse behind the curtain of what's really going on in Shop.

* I get to build almost anything I want: My ideas are valued.
* I must do my own work: I am capable. I am responsible.
* I must finish what I start: I value my own ideas. I am mindful of resources.
* I only take two or three pieces of wood at a time: I can consider the needs of others.
* I am taught how to use tools safely: My teachers care that I am safe. I am trusted.
* There are not enough hammers for everyone to claim one for him/herself: I can share. I can be patient.
* There are not enough teachers to help everyone at once: I can take turns. My classmates and I can help each other.
* I can't always finish my project in a single period: My ideas are worth extended effort. I can postpone my gratification. I can weather disappointment.
* It is okay to make mistakes: Learning new skills takes time. I don't expect myself to be perfect.
* My teacher takes notes about my work: My efforts are valued. I can reflect on my actions and choices.
* My teacher is "silly": My teacher enjoys working and playing with me.

Together, the children and I are building a good deal more in Shop than the wooden artifacts suggest.

The photo above is one of Mike's students at work. More photos are available on the school's wood shop website.

Wissenschaft und kenntnis...

I had been to an art opening in which I had a piece or two of my work and in an adjoining gallery were a whole collection of works done in ceramics by another artist. As I walked among her works, I found them to be unusual, but of no particular meaning to me. I could barely relate. Then I attended a brief lecture by the artist in which she attempted to explain her work. Following her lecture, she asked the audience for a show of hands. Did the explanation help viewers to understand her work at a greater depth? We all, without exception raised our hands.

And there you have outlined the proper relationship between wissenschaft and kenntnis. Wissenschaft is the explanation as conveyed by others through books or lecture. Kenntnis is the experience of the object or subject.

I am limited to typing on one hand with the most important letters on the qwerty keyboard inaccessible to my left hand. I am grateful that this is a temporary infirmity. So, this will be brief.

Imagine the artist's explanation of the show and its parts without the viewer having the opportunity to actually observe the real works. There you have American education in a nutshell. Finding the proper balance between wissenschaft and kenntnis is the secret to effective education. Too much in the books and not enough in the hands is a formula for educational disaster of epic proportions.

Elliot Washor sent me this link to a video on the trades that features Mike Rose: Making an Art of Work. The trailer is shown above.

Make, fix und create...

bring it on?

Sir Ken Robinson is a spokesman for education revolution, and it seems that as bad as so many things have gotten, revolution may actually be more relevant than reform. One of my students from last week is a science teacher at the high school level, and he said that the current system forces teachers to "teach to the test" even though they are told explicitly not to. Teacher salaries are tied to student test scores, and so in order for a teacher to do well, both as recognixed by administration and in economic terms, he or she must make certain that students know the materials on which they will be tested. They have no time or resources for anything more. But the real problems that students will face in life will be those which have not arisen yet. And so, how can we test for that? You will find that what Sir Ken is looking for is education that fosters creativity like what you would find at the Clear Spring School.


Sir Ken Robinson suggests that students need to be placed in situations that encourage creative problem solving. Lessons need to be individualized and personalized. Give kids real things to do, and you will watch their interests rise. Give them real things upon which to be tested (not bubble tests) and they will learn more deeply, and retain learning much longer. I can tell you this, but you will know the truth by looking backwards and seeing what things you remember most from your own experience. If you don't have much to remember, you must have already been in a pretty crappy school experience.

Many educators believe that the educational revolution will best be a digital one, in which iPads and other devices are used in the classroom by children of all ages. I am thinking the revolution may best be the simpler one that was proposed by Charles H. Ham in the late 1800s. He said that schools should become workshops, humming with real work. Saws, hammers and even knives present creative technologies that allow children to take an active rather than passive role in their own learning. Saws, hammers and real tools of all kinds also present the opportunity for learning to progress naturally and most effectively in the manner that early educators prescribed... from the known to the unknown, from the easy to the more difficult, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract.

Blog reader Randall sent me this link to an excellent article by Mike Rose, UCLA professor and author of Mind at Work. Blue Collar Brilliance: Questioning assumptions about intelligence, work, and social class

Make, fix and create...

the knife

It is interesting how some things come to us in the night. Do you wake up in the night with things on your mind that are related to what you're to be doing the next day? 

Last night I was thinking of educational Sloyd and how difficult it can be to contend with grain during the use of the knife. In early sloyd model series, one of the challenging models was that of the scoop, a common tool carved from wood. 

The challenge is to get a clean cut where there's a reversal of grain. You can use a chisel or gouge, or a knife with a hooked blade, but there's no ideal tool to make the task easy without the intense application of mind and without hands well-trained and practiced for the task.

The following was translated for me from a book written in early Norwegian by N. Christian Jacobsen,

I Sløjdsagen Et Inlæg

"The knife is that tool which a child most naturally and easily grasps: it is simple to have at hand and can be used for both this and that. It is a tool with which much work can completely be done, and without help from another. Yes, nothing more on this need be said; the knife is above all else the tool of ordinary dexterity, that is to say, sloyd’s tool. 

"But it is with the knife as with smoothing: it is not appealing to start with when the mechanical saw comes before it. The knife makes large demands on thought and on the hand. The saw can be operated mechanically while the knife requires a freedom which consists in developing one's own effort. In hand skills in particular the knife is especially suited for the development of the sense of form in right-angle and curved forms. 

"What counts with the knife is to be able to freely put it to use through a multitude of hand movements, under which the aimed at form must be brought into clear focus, and the nature of the wood and action of the tools steadily observed. This compels to continual consideration and continual search for the desired form lying in the material before its emergence. – N. Christian Jacobsen, Kristiania (Oslo) January 1892"

I'm grateful to Barbara Bauer for her translation, and Christian Jacobsen, one of Otto Salomon's favorite authors suggests the complexity of one of our most simple tools.

It's amazing how academic life often revolves around the acquisition and regurgitation of information rather than demonstration of direct learning. The consequences for society are disastrous. We are carefully trained to undervalue the contributions of those who've labored long and hard to develop skill.

The photo shows a simple pin hinge inserted in a tiny box. It was one of my planned accomplishments for yesterday in the wood shop. How can such a simple thing be challenging? Would you not just simply take such things for granted? 

In order for the hinge to operate smoothly, the pin has to be positioned exactly on both sides. In order for that to be done with success on a number of boxes requires having the  right tools available, having the tools set up properly (measurement, measurement and measurement again) and having a feel for the process. For an exploration of the ways mind is applied in fields that we've been trained to think of as mindless, I recommend a book by Mike Rose, The Mind at Work.

Make, fix and create...

Northern Woodlands

My review of Shop Class as Soulcraft for Northern Woodlands magazine has been edited and approved for the next issue. Northern Woodlands is an informative regional publication that has great articles about nature and the outdoors with a particular emphasis on forest and stream ecology and sustainable forestry practices. It also offers an interesting email newsletter that might be of special interest and entertainment to my regular readers.

Shop Class as Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
By Matthew Crawford
Penguin Press, 2009

One morning I followed a link sent to me by a friend and found that I had been quoted in The New York Times. That’s not a thing that happens often to woodshop teachers.

The article cited my blog in its discussion of Matthew Crawford’s best selling book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Crawford’s book opens by quoting me:

“In schools we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement… Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

Such a statement could have been made by any of the remaining woodshop teachers in America. We all know in our hearts, through our own soulcraft, that our students learn best when their hands are engaged in real problem solving.

Certainly, Crawford’s book isn’t the first to look at the values of work and the absurdities of the blue collar/white collar divide, though all of us hand-guys and shop teachers revel in its success. As a woodshop teacher and hands-on learning enthusiast, I welcome all the help I can get in explaining the value of my program. Crawford’s well-written exploration is a much-valued addition to others on the subject. Mike Rose’s Mind at Work and Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman are recent books that come to mind that inquire intelligently about the values of work.

Soulcraft’s great appeal is that it is an engaging story well told from personal experience by someone measured successful on both sides of the white collar/blue collar divide, someone who chose the blue and provides eloquent defense of his decision. It illuminates our misperceptions of the values of each and presents a strong case for rethinking the educational goals we might reasonably demand of our children. I was one of those whose parental aspirations were that I might become a lawyer before my own hands and heart got in the way of their ambitions for me. So I am particularly pleased to see anyone make the case that a craftsman or tradesman can find in his work not only pleasure but also success and meaning.

Crawford is a Ph.D. philosopher turned motorcycle mechanic. His tale shows that our ideal of university education for all may for some be a waste of time and for some a great disservice. Many reluctant students might find greater pleasure and deeper meaning in the direct hands-on problem solving that a life in the trades can provide. As suggested by another book, The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, a life in the trades might even end up making more money.

Perhaps most pleasing is that Crawford demonstrates his chops as both a mechanic and philosopher, through thoughtful and coherent discourse. Motorcycle mechanics and philosophy? That is not necessarily a surprise, since years ago we had Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and readers may sense a connection. But long before that Jean Jacques Rousseau had said in Emelius and Sophia, 1763: “If instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a workshop, his hands labor to the profit of his mind, he becomes a philosopher but fancies he is only a workman.”

Doug Stowe

Crystal Bridges...

Carved Redwood sculpture by Robyn Horn

My wife and I attended a preview opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art yesterday. The official opening will be 11/11/2011, or this Friday. Please don't think you can just show up, even though attendance will be free. For the first month or so the attendance is expected to be huge and you should reserve your tickets on-line through the museum website. A friend of ours got a 5:30 AM time slot, and found it worthwhile, even getting up at 3:30 AM to arrive on time. My wife and I had a lovely day, and will go back again and again.

The work is sublime. The building is exquisite, and will no doubt become regarded as an architectural tour de force. Curving glass walls and glue laminated curved ceiling joists form bridges spanning two lakes and a small watercourse through a natural hollow on land that had been a personal nature preserve owned by Neil Compton, father of the Buffalo National River.
My own small boxes are featured in the museum gift store along with works by other Arkansas artists, including basketry by Leon Niehues.
One of the first pieces we saw as we entered the museum was work by my good friend Robyn Horn. It is carved redwood and shown in the photo at upper left. At above you see curved glass forming the boundary between the interior and exterior space of the museum grounds. The grounds will become even more beautiful now that the major construction is complete.


And then of course within museums we find work of historic significance and emotional effect. At left is the famous Rosie the Riveter.

Readers of this blog will enjoy a piece written by Mike Rose, author of Mind at Work, Cognitive full throttle: When Education for work ignites the mind.

Also, I want to remind my readers that you can enter to win a signed copy of my new book, Building Small Cabinets on theFine Woodworking Website.

Make, fix and create...

Happy labor day

People should read Mike Rose's book "The Mind at Work:Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker." It was published in 2005 and I offer it as a classic. He was inspired by his mother (a waitress), his uncle Frank (a welder) and his own highs school experience to reevaluate the relative intellectual  content of various professions and trades and the social stratification that results from the colossal misunderstanding of intellect and how it evolves with the assistance of the hands. https://amzn.to/3I1sAQu

Make, fix and create... offset the growing impact of artificial intelligence by doing something real.

theory and practice...

This morning, I have been contemplating how difficult we have made things in school. It is difficult to sit still. It is difficult to keep one's attention on the subject. For the teacher it is difficult to keep children's attention focused on their lessons without becoming tyrannical. A local public elementary school teacher, commenting on the challenge of her work said, "Each day is like planning a party for 25 kids." And while that might sound like fun, it is also relentless. It is certainly not easy, even for the best. Children these days with all their digital devices and video content, who fall asleep at bedtime with the TV going, are not easy to entertain, let alone teach.

And yet, for children to learn is the most easy and natural of human functions. We are wired for it. When awakened by a fire for learning as Mike Rose describes in his blog post, Full Cognitive Throttle children are voracious learners.

The following is from the Great Didactic of Comenius, the first great text of modern pedagogy, which has been nearly completely ignored in the design of modern education:

1. "Theory," says Vives, "is easy and short, but has no result other than the gratification that it affords. Practice on the other hand, is difficult and prolix, but is of immense utility." Since this is so, we should diligently seek out a method by which the young may be easily led to the practical application of natural forces, which is to be found in the arts.

I was lucky in my youth to have a trained kindergarten teacher as my mother, and she kept my sisters and I busy with paper, scissors, glue, string, paints and clay, and so we learned that learning was not just about what happened in our heads, but what happened in our hands as well.

As one who came to teaching from being a craftsman, I understand the value of practice, and have come to understand that theory itself is not what captures children's fire for learning. At some point, learning needs to connect with their own hands just as it did for mine. Here is just a bit more from the Great Didactic:

7. The use of instruments should be shown in practice and not by words; that is to say, by example rather than by precept. It is many years since Quintilian said: "Through precepts the way is long and difficult, while through examples it is short and practicable." But alas, how little heed the ordinary schools pay to this advice.

That was written by Comenius in 1631, so you can see we've kept education heading in the wrong direction.

Today I'm working in my own wood shop. I started making a series of small jewelry boxes yesterday, and today should get to the point of making drawers. The textured and painted top panels can be seen above. The assembled boxes with drawer fronts can be seen below.

If your child is not catching fire for learning at school, turn off the TV at home and offer some real things that can be learned in his or her own hands. You can register to win a copy of my new book Building Small Cabinets by commenting on this post on the Fine Woodworking website. I would love for one of my regular readers to win.

Make, fix and create...

mixed or undergraded classrooms.

The following is from Mike Rose's blog post of Jun 11, 2009:

The idea of “mixed age” or “undergraded” primary classrooms gained some national popularity in the late 1950s and sixties, then faded; it is once again being discussed as part of school reform. The pleasant, productive chaos of Rooms 13 and 14 at Franklin Elementary belied the boldness of Anne and Abby’s experiment, for what they were doing challenged one of the most widespread practices in elementary education: setting cognitive and linguistic benchmarks for children’s development.

“Children just don’t learn to read or write or count or compute at the same time,” Abby said in exasperation. “There’s all kinds of normal variation. Some kids don’t really start reading until the second grade, and they go on to become fluent readers.” Yet the anxiety that can be generated when a child doesn’t hit one of these arbitrary benchmarks—especially among some affluent parents who attach great significance to such measures—is considerable and can lead to a range of remedial interventions, some more harmful than helpful.

Through this year, students at Clear Spring School have been in classroom groupings of 1st and 2nd, 3rd and 4th, 5th and 6th, 7th and 8th, etc. This next year, we are changing to a Montessori grouping of three grade levels in each class. This nearly completely removes the pressures that result from having only a brief window for growth, allowing children to grow outwardly in response to inner development rather than as set by standards and external expectations. In many classrooms, if a child's development does not conform to specific norms, he or she may be viewed as lacking in intelligence or lazy and accept other's assessments of him or herself as such, when it is really the system that is at fault. I have told the story of Procrustes before.

character...

First, we know a child's ultimate integration into society, and his or her finding some form of "success" within it has as much to do with what are called traits of "character" as with intellect. You can have very smart kids that take wrong turns, do stupid things, or simply wither in laziness.

Mike Rose's new book, “Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us,” asks some very important questions and raises very important points having to do with "character," as described in this article in the Washington Post, The misguided effort to teach ‘character.’

"It is healthy to be reminded about the fuller scope of education in our test- and grade-obsessed culture, but what concerns me is that the advocates for character accept without question the reductive notion of cognition that runs through our education policies, and by accepting it, further affirm it. The problem is exacerbated by the aforementioned way economists carve up and define mental activity. If cognition is represented by scores on ability or achievement tests, then anything not captured in those scores—like the desired qualities of character—is, de facto, noncognitive. We’re now left with a skimpy notion of cognition and a reductive dichotomy to boot. This downplaying of the cognitive and the construction of the cognitive/noncognitive binary will have some troubling implications for education, especially for the education of the children of the poor.

The idea that aspects of character: independence, resillience, persistence, creativity, skills of collaboration and cooperative problem solving, are "non-cognitive" is a branch of educational stupidity I've addressed previously in the blog, in a post entitled It's more than just woodshop and other posts as well. It seems I have to keep repeating myself in the hopes that at some point, people will listen, test what I've shared within the fabric of their own understanding and do something about what ails education in this nation.

Also, without remorse for having repeated myself, I'll mention the child's most natural inclination toward craftsmanship. Given even the slightest chance, children are inclined to make things, and as they grow and learn, are naturally inclined to become skilled in making things. Within the unscripted confines of craftsmanship and artistry, are available all the necessary traits of character that children must develop to find meaningful places within human culture, let alone "success."

Today is a big day here in Eureka Springs as we will learn from the Arkansas Public Service Commission whether or not they intend to wade into the AEP/SWEPCO power line proposal that has been threatening our small local community. They will do one of four things as I had mentioned in an earlier post. The least likely thing for them to do is to throw the application out. But they should know by now that any decision they make to enable construction of the power line will only add to their embarrassment.

Make, fix, create, and lead others to join you in it.

Apple Pie: The intellectual content of work with hands

There is an artificial divide in America in which the work of the hands is regarded as being of lesser intellectual content. Mike Rose's book, Mind at Work is a great reminder that when it comes to the brain, all is not exactly as it may appear. Thanksgiving is another reminder. The hands never function in isolation from intellect, and the intellect, if it is to function with any degree of certainty and reliability, must involve the hands... whether in the making of things with beauty (and flavor) and utility, or in the exploration of the most abstract concepts of science.

So what you see here is the American classic, Apple Pie. I will remind my gentle readers that it is far, far better to explore your relationships to reality and interpersonal relationship by baking, fixing and making in your own hands.

Enjoy this Thanksgiving day by putting your hands to work. Share with friends for the most satisfying results.

book review

I was asked by a magazine to write a 500 word review of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Unedited, this is what I've written:

One morning I followed a link sent to me by a friend and found that I had been quoted in the New York Times. That’s not a thing that happens often to wood shop teachers. I found out later that the opening lines, chapter one in Matthew Crawford’s best selling book from which the article was drawn, Shop Class as Soulcraft, An Inquiry Into the Value of Work were my own words as follows:

In Schools we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement… Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged. --Wisdom of the Hands blog post of October 16, 2006

Such a statement could have been made by any of the remaining wood shop teachers in America. We all know in our hearts, through our own soulcraft, that our students learn best when their hands are engaged in real problem solving.

Certainly, Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft isn’t the first book to look at the values of work and the absurdities of the blue collar/white collar divide, though all of us hand-guys and shop teachers revel in its success. As a wood shop teacher and hands-on learning enthusiast, I welcome all the help I can get in explaining the value of my program. Crawford’s well-written exploration is a much-valued addition to others on the subject. Mike Rose’s Mind at Work and Richard Sennett’s the Craftsman are recent books that come to mind that inquired intelligently about the values of work.

Soulcraft’s great appeal is that it is an engaging story well told from personal experience by someone measured successful on both sides of the white collar/blue collar divide who chose the blue and provides eloquent defense of his decision. It illuminates our misperceptions of the values of each and presents a strong case for rethinking the educational goals we might reasonably demand of our children. I was one of those whose parental aspirations were that I might become a lawyer before my own hands and heart got in the way of their ambitions for me. So I am particularly pleased to see anyone make the case that a craftsman or tradesman can find not only pleasure in work, but success and meaning as well. Crawford is a Ph.D. philosopher, turned motorcycle mechanic, and his tale I hope informs us all that our ideal of university education for all may for some be a waste of time and for some a great disservice when many might find greater pleasure and deeper meaning in direct hands-on problem solving that a life in the trades might provide. As suggested by another book, The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, a life in the trades might even end up making more money.

Perhaps most pleasing is that Crawford demonstrates his chops as both a mechanic and philosopher, through thoughtful and coherent discourse… Motorcycle mechanics and philosophy? That for some of us is not necessarily a surprise. Years ago we had Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and readers will sense a connection. But long before that Jean Jacques Rousseau had said in Emelius and Sophia, 1763: “If instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a workshop, his hands labor to the profit of his mind, he becomes a philosopher but fancies he is only a workman.” Shop Class as Soulcraft. Read it.

Notes on the ways we learn...I presented a paper at an academic conference in Sweden in May. "Traditions in Transition" at Umeå Universitet was the first international conference on Sloyd and was attended by about 150 educators from 19 different countries. I felt a bit nervous presenting at an academic conference. After all, this was the first time I'd spent any time on a university campus since 1970 and I wondered how well I and my ideas would be accepted. In fact, one of my fellow attendees asked why I was associated with a small independent school rather than a university. Of course, my answer was, "what would I learn there?"

I knew from an examination of my own learning style that when I became interested in education, the only way for me to learn about it would be to teach. Theories are great when you have the opportunity to apply them, and have a means to test their accuracy and validity. Without the means to put words and work into the test of practical experience, they have no value to me. Nor should they have value quite so much value to others.

In 1983, Howard Gardner published his significant book, Frames of Mind, in which he rightly proposed that there are a variety of significant and important "intelligences" that aren't measured in the standardized testing, or acknowledged as valid in the educational system. Now, in American education, it would be difficult to get a degree in teaching without becoming aware of Howard Gardner's theories. The unfortunate situation, however, is that in order to get into the university to begin with, you need to be successful in the specific learning style and represent the particular "intelligence" that universities are designed to accept and encourage. Without the practical application and training to meet diverse learning styles in the university setting, Multiple Intelligences is a hollow concept. It has been proven that people tend to teach only in a manner that reflects their own learning style. As teachers rise through the system, becoming supervisors and administrators, they are filtered once again, further eliminating those whose intelligences are least represented in education.

With the advent of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the US, the pressures on teachers has been increased, and the likelihood of them being free to engage in experimentation in delivering lessons in various learning styles has been virtually eliminated.

But, my point is not to challenge NCLB legislation. It is a ridiculous mess of unfunded burden on teachers and schools but only part of a much larger problem. Instead, I challenge every American with a diploma. I ask you how we can make room in the universities for Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, allowing credentials and acknowledgement to those outside the verbal linguistic realm and allowing them to take their places within our schools and educational institutions? I know this may be a hard thing for university educated people to take. You may have become comfortable resting on the security of your diploma while you may not even have the skills or understanding required to fix a leaking faucet.

Have I offended? Perhaps I've hit a nerve that requires thoughtful examination. I would suggest a reading of Mike Rose's book "The Mind at Work : Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker." It reminds us that there are many expressions of intelligence required in our modern civilization, and that each deserves admiration, encouragement and respect.

It should also be noted that there are many people within universities throughout the world that have come to understand the importance of diverse expressions of intelligence, are cognizant of the role of the hands in learning and are working to bring change. I was grateful that my presentation in May was warmly received at Umeå, and that I discovered so many new friends.