I particularly enjoyed watching the video segment from TED about Gever Tulley's Tinkering School. After I watched it, I went through some articles I had saved on delicious.com because the video made me think of an article I had spotted a few months earlier in the New York Times.
I usually only bother to save articles on Delicious that are distinctly about education, social media, social media in education, Web 2.0, and so on, with the exception of maybe a few odd articles of special interest to me or the subjects I teach. This particular article, however, a book excerpt titled The Case For Working With Your Hands by Matthew B. Crawford, spoke volumes about education in a world blown sideways by new technology.
In this excerpt from his upcoming book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford makes a very compelling case (I think) for bringing back shop class, and for us to consider the return of the value of manual trades. I particularly loved this paragraph:
"A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work."
click here if you'd like to read on...
We all want our students to be media-literate. We have an obligation to teach them to post responsibly on the internet, comment respectfully, collaborate equitably, quote and cite honestly, and seek information mindfully. Yet there is another type of "literacy" that has value as well, and this is the place where the message of Crawford and Tulley might very well meet. What we do with students and computers in the spirit of active engagement is no more "fluff" than shop class.
(photo by me)
Hi! Your NYTimes link took me to today's paper, not the article listed. I like this stuff! I think it's great to let kids tinker and create. The same thing applies to Web 2.0.
ReplyDeleteIt was horrifying for me to watch as our metal, woodworking, and auto shops got dismantled three years ago. They were some of the most dynamic locations on the campus and the teachers were some of the most disciplined and demanding.
ReplyDeleteI started to suspect that education is an area of social class battle...the elimination of the "trades" and "handwork" in schools is a lot more calculated and a lot more mean-spirited than we would like to think.