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

[Glassman, Michael]

Tom,

You might find a very receptive audience with the John Dewey Society and related thinkers.  The idea of craftwork being of high value is a central tenet in Democracy and Education, something we have lost with STEM education (even though STEM education was originally based on Dewey type principles – go figure – or better don’t try). Vocational education and vocational schools in the United States were originally based on an (I would argue misinterpretation) of Dewey in that they really didn’t buy in completely to the idea of the basic educational worth of practical skills.  I am sure there are Dewey schools in the NYC area so that might be a place to start. But I think there is a ready and waiting audience for this type of work.

Michael

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> On Behalf Of Tom Martin
Sent: Thursday, March 07, 2019 8:40 PM
To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
Subject: [Xmca-l] Craftwork as Liberal Education - interested contacts

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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