[Xmca-l] Re: Craftwork as Liberal Education - interested contacts

[Robert Lake]

Dear Dr. Martin,
Your brief description is quite impressive and timely.
I would love to communicate with you on these issues.
Is there a way to access your full dissertation?
Kind regards,
Robert Lake


On Thu, Mar 7, 2019, 8:41 PM Tom Martin <martincommatom@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello XMCA,
>
> Apologies if this is a little off-topic, but as a long-timer lurker on
> this list, I suspect you all might have some helpful input into this
> question. My interest is in the ‘liberal’ side of craft/vocational
> education – i.e., how practical skills have educational worth beyond their
> market value; how they demonstrate a fundamental mode of understanding,
> through which learners might find personal and intellectual fulfillment.
>
> My specific question is who I might connect with in the USA who is
> interested in these themes. After finishing a PhD at Oxford, I have
> recently relocated to NYC, where my academic contacts are quite sparse. I
> would be very interested in having this conversation in more depth, and
> perhaps even publishing/working with others, if I were able to find people
> with complementary interests.
>
> I have included a relevant excerpt from my PhD below to further illustrate
> the topic I’m asking about. The full text is online at
> https://ora.ox.ac.uk/ (search my name), for anyone curious.
>
> A million thanks in advance,
>
> Tom Martin
>
>
> <dissertation excerpt begins>
>
> … Having served as a workshop trainee myself, I can confidently claim that
> learning to build wooden boats is a worthwhile undertaking for reasons that
> extend far past the market value of the resulting skills. In aligning their
> perception with that of those around them, novices like myself are
> introduced to the possible depth of understanding that perception can
> relate, as well as with the nuance in meaning that can be comprehended in a
> short glance or with a passing touch. While getting ‘the feel’ does not
> entail developing an entirely new way of interacting with the world, it
> does require exploring the extent of the possibilities of our fundamental
> mode of understanding, which we take for granted in our everyday dealings
> with physical things. Working somewhere like the wooden boat workshop
> allows the learner to encounter the myriad layers of meaning and
> context-bound purposes that operate at once within such a complex system,
> exposing him or her to the full extent of our inherent human capacity for
> meaning-making.
>
> This conception of boat building as a medium through which our fundamental
> mechanism for understanding the world can be refined points to a vision of
> craft as ‘liberal education’, a mode of fostering personal growth rather
> than solely achieving extrinsic ends (Peters, 1970b, p. 43). Of course,
> competence at work should still be a concern in a well-rounded education,
> which serves as an introduction to ways of interacting with others in
> society, fulfilling the collective functions through which we support one
> another’s needs (see Dewey, 1916/2004). As Pring points out, however,
> intellectual growth and training for work are not necessarily incompatible:
>
> *...there is a mistaken tendency to define education by contrasting it
> with what is seen to be opposite and incompatible. ‘Liberal’ is contrasted
> with vocational as if the vocational, properly taught, cannot itself be
> liberating – a way into those forms of knowledge through which a person is
> freed from ignorance, and opened to new imaginings, new possibilities
> (Pring, 2004, p. 57; org. emp.)*
>
> In the passage above, Pring echoes long-standing criticisms by Dewey
> (1916/2004) and Oakeshott (1989), who challenge the notion of a
> liberal/vocational divide in education. Collectively, these authors argue
> that subject matter has little bearing on the promise for fulfilment of
> educational aims such as intellectual growth and personal fulfilment. What
> does matter is the perspective from which a subject is taught; if the goal
> of teaching is to foster new ways of engaging with the material and social
> world, then the outcome might rightly be called ‘education’. A strict focus
> on the production of finished goods, by contrast, leads only to ‘training’,
> the memorisation of routines detached from context and therefore deprived
> of their full significance. Returning to the definition of ‘craft’ that I
> provided in the Introduction (Chapter 1) – organised practice combining
> tools, materials, and the body, joined with a sensibility for the
> aesthetic, social, and practical value of the objects produced – it becomes
> apparent that craft learning is therefore liberal education, by definition.
> My analysis throughout this thesis merely serves to translate into the
> technical language of philosophy the premise that craftspeople intuitively
> understand, that historical ways of working with tools and materials in
> their meaningful contexts demand a highly-sharpened intellect.
>
> In arguing that craft learning is intellectually comparable to the
> learning of literature, history, and the other mainstays of liberal
> education, I do not merely mean to defend craft education against those who
> would see it as mere job training. Indeed, this investigation also provides
> the logical foundation for asking what craft learning provides that those
> traditional ‘liberal arts’ do not. Peters (1970) argues that a liberal
> education cannot result in a single, narrow mode of understanding the
> world, writing that ‘[n]o scientist should emerge, for instance, without a
> good understanding of other ways of looking at the world, historically, for
> instance, or aesthetically’ (p. 44). The circumspective understanding that
> the wooden boat builders employ demonstrates a rich, nuanced way of
> ‘looking at the world’ in the most literal sense, recognising meaning in
> physical objects and their interrelationships rather than through words and
> numbers. Following Peters, it is possible to ask whether a person can be
> considered well educated without refining their perceptual capacities,
> especially if, as Heidegger asserts, pre-reflective perceptual
> understanding is our foundational mode of engaging with the world, upon
> which other ways of knowing are founded. Unfortunately, one wonders whether
> opportunities to nurture such understanding are disappearing as small-scale
> craftwork is replaced by mechanised mass production, as Heidegger (1968)
> suggests in his final lectures on understanding in the era of technology.
>
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