Philadelphia Furniture & Furnishings Show

We have grown accustomed to news media reports about the declining state of public education today, customarily measured by low verbal and math scores on standardized tests. Everyone holds an opinion, usually a grim one, about what is wrong with public schools. Indeed, the problems are complex and at times overwhelming, especially in our large and needy urban school systems. In this climate, a serious commitment to Crafts Education is not often on the agenda of school policymakers. Most craftspeople have all they can do to make objects of quality and tend to their businesses and lives, without tackling more future-oriented endeavors such as school reform. In a remarkable demonstration of leadership over the past four years, the Philadelphia Furniture and Furnishings Show has offered presentations and workshops for collectors and artisans concerning the educational needs of young craftspeople, giving evidence of its distinguished commitment to Crafts Education.

Is there anything going on in schools today which is relevant to those of us who love the crafts? A woodworker recently confessed to me his disappointment when visiting the art room of a high school he was considering for his daughter. Nowhere in sight were there any materials for three-dimensional projects! In many school art programs the third dimension is becoming the missing dimension. The loss of industrial education programs in many junior and senior high schools over the past decade has also marked the end of studies in basic materials such as wood or clay or metals for young people, courses of study which were so common for our parents and grandparents. Schools are eliminating or drastically reducing opportunities for three-dimensional work because of the decrease in time and budget for art study. School personnel often cite a need for more efficiency because of shortened classes, or a lack of storage space or cleanup time, or the fact that teachers today have too little training in three-dimensional materials.

For over 25 years, psychologist Howard Gardner has researched the brain’s relationship to diverse thinking patterns. His important work on multiple intelligences is regularly cited in the current literature about learning and schooling. In his 1983 Frames of Mind, Gardner describes human intellectual capacities which are distinctly spatial and/or bodily-kinesthetic in nature. However, the current critique of education is commonly translated into fewer hands-on activities for students and more emphasis on “boosting those test scores.” Craft work has at its core the use of the hands and the body, often in ambidextrous tactile processes – carving, joinery, weaving, clay work, metal fabrication. Most of us who love furniture also like piles of sawdust, pots of sticky glue, the whirring of machines, the clatter of tools, the angles of sharp saws, the muscles and rhythms behind a chisel, hewn textures and silky smoothness, smells of pitch and paint and varnish, a connoisseur’s eye for detail and finesse, the order of a designed arrangement. We like thinking about how things fit or feel, how the body can be supported, along with how ideas manifest themselves in physical objects. Craftspeople, by definition, join the “why” and “how” of the enterprise of making. Their activities exemplify the kind of thinking/learning/making continuum which can vivify the school experience for students, often students who are woefully underserved by other curricula – pencil/paper/computer/verbal.

There is extensive lip-service in education about the need to cultivate students’ problem-solving, critical and creative thinking abilities. Working with physical materials can deliver just such an education. An interesting art problem confronts the student with real-life, three-dimensional materials – necessarily involving many aspects of physics and chemistry, side-by-side with aesthetics, expression, and feeling.

Craftspeople are earning a rightful place within the diverse art world today. Art and Craft Education should gain a less marginal place in the school curriculum. We should not discriminate against those students, sometimes some of our neediest students, whose thought patterns benefit from, or necessitate, the physical engagement with materials. We need to redefine the studio as a place of learning, a laboratory of hands-on thinking.

Dr. Jo-Anna J. Moore is an Associate Professor of Art Education at Tyler School of Art, Temple University.