Elemental Education - A Risk Worth Exploring
We make and use tools to improve our quality of life. Human beings will never stop innovating, and its ingrained in our sub-conscience to keep moving, improving, expanding, and even consuming. Everyone one of us has an innate skill towards a craft that is waiting to be uncovered, developed and refined. A sharp edged rock requires no heat to process wood for utilitarian use…I dare you to simplify technology past these two resources. Steel interacting with wood driven by the engine of our hands is as elemental as charcoal or clay. Only heat and skill is needed for this level of innovation.
Sloyd Knife. The craftsmen in the black and white pictures is Jarrod Dahl and you can view his work here.
Is clay and charcoal the only instruments that we should allow young children to play, tinker, or innovate with? If you are old enough to talk, walk, feed yourself, and wipe…are you old enough to learn how to shape wood with a sharp edge? You are, we are, they are capable of wielding this responsibility at a young age, but as parents we are not capable of allowing our children to participate in activities with such risk. Sharpe edges means cuts, and cuts mean blood, and blood being outside of our bodies is not a good thing. Knives are tools for adults and woodworking is an adult hobby…this is the idea or rule as it exist today. In fact, I would go as far to say that knives are looked at more as a weapon of destruction than a tool of creation in today’s society. Lets go back a century and look an educational model that centered around using a knife developed by Otto Salomon.
“Again we begin with the knife because we consider it the easiest tool for children to employ, since they have already been in the habit of using it.”
- Otto Salomon, Swedish Educator
“If practical manual work is introduced, the matter is changed, for many who are dull when the head works without the hand, excel when the use of the hand is required as well as that of the head, as in handicrafts. Children who are naturally skillful and dexterous when hand and head work together, although slow when the head works alone, have often more self-respect after discovering their power and skill; and if only one in 500 be so affected, even then the course would be worth introducing.” - Otto Salomon 1875
Salomon believed in the will to create and his educational principles were laid out in his Book of Sloyd:
To instill a taste for and an appreciation of work in general.
To create a respect for hard, honest, physical labour.
To develop independence and self-reliance.
To provide training in the habits of order, accuracy, cleanliness and neatness.
To train the eye to see accurately and to appreciate the sense of beauty in form.
To develop the sense of touch and to give general dexterity to the hands.
To inculcate the habits of attention, industry, perseverance and patience.
To promote the development of the body’s physical powers.
To acquire dexterity in the use of tools.
To execute precise work and to produce useful products.
At Hands On Deck we emphasis the process and execution of the work being done. The finished product will bear the results of developed and refined skills. If you would like to take a deeper look in the work of Otto Salomon you can find his writings here.