How nice to see a consideration of shop class outside the mental — and school-day — confines of "streaming," or tracking, kids. Too often, it seems that kids are routed to shop and art classes, particularly in the upper grades, with the assumption that they can't hack academic classes. On the flip side, budding designers, engineers, and other hands-on learners are dissuaded from taking "easy" classes that may fall flat on a college application.
Times reporter Julia Scelfo interviewed Doug Stowe, an educator and woodworker in Arkansas, and he offers up several interesting tidbits. "Up until the early 1900s, there was a widespread understanding that the use of the hands was essential to the development of character and intellect," explained Stowe in The Times interview. "More recently, we've had this idea that every child should go to college and that the preparation for careers in manual arts was no longer required. ... we have forgotten all the other important things that manual training conveys."
Stowe's blog, Wisdom of the Hands, is named after a program he started a decade ago at Clear Spring School in Eureka Springs. (His effort to preserve and teach the craft of woodworking got him named a Living Treasure there in 2009).
Another interesting take comes from Abigail Norman, director of the Eliot School in Boston: "Children are so driven to find the right answer, to put their name on the right place on the page, to fill in the right multiple-choice question, to blacken the right dot. They're crying out for opportunities to use their creative mind to take creative risks. Woodworking and art supply that."
Of course, the article's author does due diligence in explaining that, y-e-s, power tools in the hands of both 3- and 16-year-olds can be dangerous. But as Brian Cohen, a former music industry exec and co-founder of Beam Camp, a "summer art and building" camp in New Hampshire, points out "tetherball is more dangerous than the shop."
Interestingly, Cohen explained that he started Beam Camp after noting the hours and hours kids were using iPods and laptops. Now, he has kids aged from 7 to 16 building geodesic domes "in the shape of virus protein shells" and parade floats with kinetic sculptures.
The article also offered me a nice reminder of a wonderful San Francisco resource: The Randall Museum, packed with rogue city critters, ceramic and theater courses, and a children (and adult) woodworking program. According to The Times, the museum has doubled the number of its classes and added one for preschoolers in recent years. Now that I think about it, as a leftie — surrounded by woodworking gear made for right-handers in the Randall, where I made a ridiculously sturdy oak bookshelf — shop could be just a dangerous as tetherball.
Photo sources: The New York Times, The Randall Museum (yep, that photo is from museum)
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