Don’t discount the value of ‘making’
The quasi-classical high-school education I received in the late 1950s left me able to conjugate Latin verbs and, given any single sentence, reel off the next paragraph of Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid in true dactylic hexameter — both invaluable life skills.
My high school, committed as it was to preparing us boys for university, Duntroon Military College (Australia’s West Point) or the priesthood, did not have any kind of industrial or practical-arts program.
Granted, we did have a .22-calibre rifle range.
We also had access to a variety of decommissioned Australian infantry weapons, and a favourite lunchtime activity was a contest to see who could strip and reassemble a Bren gun the fastest — another life skill, apparently.
That was as near to any kind of practical education as we experienced, and to this day, my wife watches in fascinated horror as I try to drive a nail straight or turn a screw without stripping the head.
Adult life — surrounded by men and women who could fix plumbing, build sheds or, as in the case of one close friend, build an entire house — has been a challenge.
Even though most high schools today offer programs in woodwork, metalwork, auto mechanics or industrial design and technology, it is still sometimes difficult to convince parents that a high school path leading to apprenticeship and a trades ticket is not just some compromised, secondclass education.
Fortunately, senior educators are expressing concern about what they see as our culture’s decline in tool use. People who at one time would make or fix things now buy what they once fixed themselves.
The result has been a decline in practical-arts enrolments in high schools at a time when experienced tradespeople are in short supply and command top dollar. That’s painfully obvious to anyone who has tried to find a good carpenter, plumber or electrician at short notice.
It’s an irony when even the Wall Street Journal recently wondered whether “skilled [manual] labour is becoming one of the few sure paths to a good living.”
As far back as 1996, the financial rewards accruing to tradespeople were highlighted by the bestseller The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko. The authors describe a typical millionaire as being more likely to be the guy driving a pickup, with his own business in the trades.
It is refreshing, then, to watch the latest trend in modern educational thinking called “the maker movement,” celebrated in books such as Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford.
The maker culture includes traditional activities such as metalworking and woodworking but also such engineering-oriented pursuits as electronics and robotics. There is a strong focus on using and learning practical skills and applying them to reference designs.
The maker movement is not necessarily about finding ways to accumulate wealth, although that might be a secondary advantage. It is more a trend in which individuals or groups create and market products made from unused, discarded or broken electronic components, or almost any raw material or product. It emphasizes learning through doing in a social (classroom) environment.
Maker culture encourages novel applications of existing technologies and the exploration of commonalities among traditionally separate domains such as metalworking, calligraphy, filmmaking and computer programming. It has attracted the interest of educators who are concerned about students’ disengagement from STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in formal educational settings.
Vancouver’s Templeton Secondary School has students building a laptop-controlled “Mars rover.” It’s an exercise that integrates multiple disciplines into a true 21st-century learning environment.
A 2014 article by Alyssa Costerton-Grant describes how the University of British Columbia, in partnership with the Industry Training Authority, piloted five “maker days” in Kelowna, Sicamous and Maple Ridge as a way of introducing trades and technology and experiential learning opportunities from kindergarten to Grade 12. At maker days, students and educators are introduced to “making” through small-group design challenges that encourage invention, prototyping and experimenting as a background to practical arts.
All of which sounds like way more fun than learning to conjugate Latin verbs or discovering how Virgil’s Aeneas crossed the River Styx.