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

[Tom Martin]

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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