Philosophical about Working with Your Hands

Credit: ecmorgan/Flickr

New York Times writer Matthew B. Crawford examines the benefits of real work. His discussion is mostly on motorcycles, but there’s a lot that speaks to working with wood and DIY.

One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

Matthew Kenney over at Fine Woodworking writes that the shop teacher is none other than woodworker Doug Stowe.

More from the article:

There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects…