As a former K-12 teacher I was recently interviewed for an article about whether smart phones should be allowed in schools. Teachers often find them to be distracting and disruptive, but many parents feel that the phones should be constantly at hand so that their kids will be available to them at the drop of a hat. This puts educators in a difficult place. Popular apps are designed to be addictive. Yet despite repeated warnings from the American Council of Pediatrics about damage to children’s mental and physical health, parents have nearly all joined the juggernaut of high-tech, few questions asked. When one parent asked a child development specialist about the wonders of hand and eye coordination facilitated by digital devices, the expert asked the concerned parent whether he’d heard of scissors. So the development of hand and eye coordination and the resulting intellectual formation are not new things that require the acquisition of expensive digital apparatus.
I’d noticed teaching woodworking K-12 for 20 years (I retired in 2021) that when students are deeply engaged in doing real things, the phones were put away, not by my insistence, but because they are in the way and offer less appeal than what my students discover in doing real things.
When I teach adults (I still do), and if the issue of phones comes up, I let my students know that they are welcome to take photos or videos so they can remember the processes of making beautiful and useful things from wood. The phones that would have been a distraction are utilized as tools instead. One of the advantages I have is that my adult students signed up for the class and pay for lessons they desire. There are things they want to take home as evidence of what they’ve learned in class. Having real objectives for learning puts the phone’s distractions out of mind at least for a time, and there’s no way a student can guide a piece of wood through a table saw while holding a phone.
When it comes to kids, on the other hand, they may not be quite sure how the lessons the adults want to teach will fit into their own lives. By the time kids are phone age (which happens very early these days) they’ve likely already noted that the classroom can be one of the more boring places to hang out. That would not be the case if students were offered real things to do. Boring was never a word used in my woodshop at the Clear Spring School.
So does the real problem with digital technology in schools lie with the devices themselves or with the situation that regularly produces disinterest? Even when I was in high school, decades before the invasion of iPhones into classrooms, my mind was fully capable of withdrawing from the lessons at hand. I doodled and thought of so many other things to kill time as I’m sure every other student did when facing the numbness of American education.
The most important thing to notice about hand-held digital devices is not the device itself, but the way they engage the hands. We notice how proficiently and smoothly the fingers of our children slide over the flat screens. This tactile appeal is what makes these devices hold our children’s interest so strongly. We witness this also in ourselves.
Philosophers since Anaxagoras (c. 500 – c. 428 BC) have noted the close relationship between the hands and the development of human intellect. The hand-brain partnership in learning that develops in infancy remains strong throughout our lives.
The use of the hands in real-life learning not only allows students to better assess the truth of what they learn, it also allows students to respond to what they’ve learned and test for themselves what they have learned by creating useful beauty in service to family, community, and others, thus turning the school environment from passive to active. In such activity, students can feel fully engaged.
Human beings have various means to assess truth that differ remarkably from the exercise of fingers sliding over glass. For instance, our hands have the capacity to assess the actual weight, density, temperature, and texture of objects that artificial intelligence and our devices do not. Perhaps we should heed the warning that the word “artificial” implies and choose to become more deeply engaged in the real world that surrounds us. There’s a richness in the physical world the internet may suggest but cannot tangibly convey.
Perhaps this limitation is the same one that’s always plagued book-based education. John Amos Comenius, considered to be the father of modern pedagogy, said in the seventeenth century,
"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."
What better play can we find for either boys or girls than the activities found in woodshops, kitchens, or the arts? 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.
We can say the same for girls as well. You can’t push a rope. But you can pull one to very great effect. By ignoring the nature of the child, we create education that is less effective. By failing to demonstrate reasons for direct engagement we’ve informed students that their time and ours is of little value to them or to us. But if we were to use their natural inclinations to our best advantage, thus pulling the rope, schooling would become more effective and compelling. If a great teacher in the seventeenth century could understand children so clearly, and if subsequent educational leaders like Pestalozzi, Froebel, Salomon, Dewey, and Montessori understood children so well, why has institutionalized education lost sight of human nature?
I admit having children do real things requires having smaller classes, more teachers, and greater preparation than having large number of students sit idly at desks while lessons are administered by rote and classroom management takes precedence over development and growth.
Do something in the real world and the whole range of senses and intelligences come into play. The eyes see, the ears hear, we feel the forces of gravity acting on our limbs and body as we move and play. The engagement of the full array of senses assures the students that their learning experience is absolutely real and deserving their undivided attention. The hands, of course, are drawn to test and confirm what the other senses have conveyed. And the mind surveys and assesses all that the senses provide. That’s called learning, folks.
While artificial intelligence and the internet can provide a level of distraction, and addictive entertainment, we make a tremendous mistake by failing to offer the real world to our children before they’ve lost themselves in the internet and social media.
There’s real potential in the use of artificial intelligence in various fields. There’s danger too, as the internet becomes an echo chamber for misinformation and deliberate distortion of facts.
A populace properly “armed” by experience in the real world has greater likelihood of testing the “truth” of misinformation it’s bombarded with each day.
A healthy approach to the internet should involve a deep level of distrust. And that distrust can be tested in comparing what we find there with our own practical experience and the expertise of those who have invested their whole lives in study of the real world. And it is clear that a better balance between the world of high-tech and the physical world engaged through our own hands might be key.
For instance, I watched a YouTube video of someone demonstrating how to cut a dovetail joint by hand. He had the wood mounted vertically in the vise while hitting it with a chisel held horizontally—not the way a more experienced wood worker would approach the task. With the wood held standing vertically in the vise, the wood flexes with each blow of the mallet, allowing the chisel to also bounce out of your intended position for the cut. But when the stock is flat on the bench, there’s better backing to the cut allowing the chisel to enter the wood with greater force and stay in position while it does so. With the chisel held vertically and the stock more fully supported by the mass of the workbench underneath, gravity helps to hold the chisel in position, easing the amount of direct attention required and vastly improving the accuracy of the cut.
The video could have been more accurately described as “how not to cut a dovetail joint,” and yet the video had been viewed thousands of times, accepted as truth, and recommended to others. The simple point is that there’s a lot of stuff out there. In sorting wheat from chaff, it’s best if you are well acquainted with wheat. And that involves doing some real things in which your hands and all the body’s senses have been involved.
So how can we turn the tide? In 2000, I was a self-employed woodworker with a daughter in seventh grade and regretting the loss of woodshops in American education. I obtained a grant allowing me to start the Wisdom of the Hands program at my daughter’s school. Thanks to the continued support of the Windgate Foundation, I was able to offer woodworking education to the students at the Clear Spring School for the next 20 years.
The Wisdom of the Hands program was designed to integrate woodworking projects with other classroom studies, and through collaboration bring math, history, literature, and science into a deeper, hands-on approach, thus addressing a broad range of subjects outside the walls of the shop. The same can be done in every school by bringing more artisans on board and creating the space and the budget for them to work and integrate their work into the fabric of schooling.
In Mind and Hand, published in 1886, Charles H. Hamm proposed the ideal school and the need for it as follows:
“It is the most astounding fact of history that education has been confined to abstractions. The schools have taught history, mathematics, language and literature and the sciences to the utter exclusion of the arts, not withstanding the obvious fact that it is through the arts alone that other branches of learning touch human life... In a word, public education stops at the exact point where it should begin to apply the theories it has imparted... At this point the school of mental and manual training combined—the Ideal School—begins; not only books but tools are put into the hands of the pupil, with this injunction of Comenius; “"Let those things that have to be done be learned by doing them.”
With the phones having become ever present and a source of conflict, can we find better uses for them? There are ways. Use them to document and share the other wonderful things that teachers, students, and their hands actually do beyond just “learning.” There are apps for that. One notable app is ESRI for education. It offers mapping and story-telling capacities on student phones that classmates use to explore and better understand the communities in which they live. Want to know where all those pipes go? ESRI can help you find out, map and share in a way meaningful to others. It can be used to document species in your neighborhood, or the interconnected histories, stories, and relationships of the people in your town.
Phones are tools, powerful and irresistible ones at that, and we need to train our teachers and students to use them as such. We need to develop stronger learning partnerships between low-tech (remember scissors?) and high-tech digital devices. Doing real things in association with phone use could be a marriage of real life and technology that students, teachers, and hands could not resist.
Within each town and city in the US, there are artisans (including the culinary arts of course) and makers whose hands would be useful in shaping American education in a more meaningful direction. Bring them in, help them to be understood and valued within the academic environment, and put them to use, please. Invite them into all schools, pay them well for their expertise, and let the transformation of American education unfold. As a woodworker turned teacher, I found teaching to be a wonderful stimulation to my own creativity, and I know other artisans would find the same. And as stated so clearly by Charles H. Hamm in the nineteenth century, it is through the arts alone that the various branches of learning touch human life.
Image Via: The Central Times
