As a woodworker for the last forty-eight years and a teacher of fellow artisans for over a quarter century, I have come to learn that the intelligence of the hand and mind grow together. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras claimed that man is the wisest of all animals because he has hands. In 1833 Sir Charles Bell wrote that “the hand is the instrument for perfecting the other senses and developing the endowments of the mind itself.” And more recently Frank Wilson, author of The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, has made a similar point in an evolutionary context, noting that “the hand-brain system, or partnership, that came into being over the course of millions of years is responsible for the distinctive life and culture of human society. This same hand-brain partnership exists genetically as a developmental instruction program for every living human. Each of us, beginning at birth, is predisposed to engage our world and to develop our intelligence primarily through the agency of our hands.”

And yet we now live in a world in which the common objects of our everyday lives are made by others and shipped to us at great cost to the environment, to our communities, and to ourselves. We have become a “service economy” in an “information age” in which tech companies reduce us to data that can be sold to those hoping to sell us more meaningless, planet-destroying stuff.

In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” The journey of a craftsman’s life is fraught with trial and error, matched hopefully with some level of forgiveness from others as well as from oneself. Progress comes slowly. How do we make the journey back to recognizing the value of making beautiful and useful things?

In the abstract, we can believe whatever we want. We can make something up, insist on its truth, and persuade ourselves and others it’s true even when evidence is lacking for or piled in heaps against our claim. But when you cut a dovetail joint, or drive a nail into wood, there’s no lying about whether the joint was cleanly cut and will last, or whether the nail was bent on its way in. The evidence is plain and there for all to see with their eyes and measure with their hands. That’s not the case in much of American education.

The urge to create and the subsequent urge to create something better are embedded in each child. Give a child a blank sheet of paper and some crayons and see what happens. Even children are compelled to make. In the 1880s as manual arts were being introduced into American education, some, recognizing the universal impulse in children to make things, urged that all learning be hands-on and directly involve all the senses. For instance, Charles H. Ham, an advocate for educational reform, wrote in 1886 that “the schools have taught history, mathematics, language and literature and the sciences to the utter exclusion of the arts,” but that it was through the arts that the various branches of learning “touch human life.” Ham proposed an “Ideal School” that would integrate the use of the hands into academic life, noting the words of Comenius, “Let those things that have to be done be learned by doing them.” He further insisted that by “combining manual with intellectual training . . . the laborer will feel the pride of a genuine triumph; for the consciousness that every thought-impelled blow educates him, and so raises him in the scale of manhood, will nerve his arm, and fire his brain with hope and courage.”

Two decades later, at a meeting of manual-arts teachers in 1903, architect Will Price noted the close relationship between the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement in the US and the offering of manual-arts training in schools. That training left a hunger for creative activities in the hands of each child. Putting more arts and crafts in schools, he contended, would have a transformational effect. It would stimulate greater interest in attending school for those students who are not academically inclined. Even those who normally excel at academic activities would find greater richness and depth of learning as they made connections between the objects celebrated in museums and their own abilities to create useful beauty themselves. As French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, “Put a young man in a workshop, his hands will work to the benefit of his brain, and he’ll become a philosopher while thinking himself only a craftsman.”

It is clear for those involved in the maker movement and in crafts that making things of useful beauty can make us feel differently about ourselves. But that is not all it does. In the early manual-training movement that Ham described lay the seeds of helping us feel differently about each other. Manual training in schools, where it was offered to all students including those planning sedentary lives, was intended to develop a sense of the dignity of all labour, thus ensuring a society in which we hold each other and our mutual contributions in high regard. If you’ve even tried without success to cut a dovetail joint or hammer a nail into wood, you will gain at least a modicum of respect for those who have the talent and the desire to develop skills to do what you cannot.

In my book The Wisdom of Our Hands: Crafting, a Life, I dedicate a chapter to the practice of forgiveness. One thing that all artisans discover is that when we make mistakes, they often, through the practice of forgiveness, lead to greater discoveries that rub off in our forgiveness and understanding of others. Self-recrimination at our mistakes tends to have a ripple effect, robbing us of our powers to create. But when we see the human effort and intent that underlies our own work and the work of others, and simply slow down and reflect without anger, we find new pathways revealed. Crafts have a way of humanizing us as we strive to even higher planes in our work. Woodturners, for example, often call their errors on the lathe “design opportunities.” A “catch” removing too much wood at one spot in a bowl can present the opportunity to rethink the overall shape of a turned piece. Taken with the right attitude, errors can lead to bursts of unanticipated growth.

Likewise, I recently sold a box with an error on Etsy. I had routed a groove for a tab for opening the lid in the wrong place, near the bottom instead of the top. As a remedy, I put in two grooves: one useful above another, useless one. Then I shaped the lower portion to resemble a fake drawer. For my customer, my recognition of the error and my odd fix made the box more appealing. Aren’t we often drawn to expressions of our humanity? In my woodworking classes for both children and adults, one of the most important things I can convey is the right attitude to the mistakes we inevitably make. We’re human, get over it. It’s how we learn and grow.

In addition to providing an arena in which human values can be exercised, practiced, and assessed, craftsmanship can serve as a foundation for the assessment of truth, particularly in the face of the misinformation and deliberate deception we are hit with each day. We build a cosmology through which we view the world and assess truth (and beauty for that matter). Early progressive educators believed that learning should go from the known to the unknown, from the easy to the more difficult, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract. To follow this pattern in the design of education would build what Jerome Bruner referred to as scaffolding, a foundation in support of further learning and for the assessment of truth.

Years ago I watched a YouTube video of someone demonstrating how to cut a dovetail joint by hand. He had the wood mounted vertically in the vise while hitting it with a chisel held horizontally—not the way a more experienced woodworker would approach the task.

With the wood standing vertically in the vise, the wood flexes with each blow of the mallet, causing the chisel to bounce out of the intended position for the cut. But when the stock is flat on the bench, there’s better backing to the cut, allowing the chisel to enter the wood with greater force and stay in position while it does so. With the chisel held vertically and the stock more fully supported by the mass of the workbench underneath, gravity helps hold the chisel in position, easing the amount of direct attention required and vastly improving the accuracy of the cut.

The video would have been more accurately described as “how not to cut a dovetail joint.” And yet it had been viewed thousands of times, accepted as truth and recommended as such to others. There’s a lot of stuff out there. Some is wrong by mistake, and some distorted to deceive. In sorting wheat from chaff, it’s best if you are well acquainted with wheat. And that involves doing real things in which your hands and all the body’s senses are involved.

To do things in the real world and then assess the results of our own actions provides a more direct understanding of cause and effect, building a more secure scaffold for assessment of the huge amount of information we sort through each day. In this age we look at our phones to see if it’s raining, but would it not be best if we looked outdoors as well?

I’m one of the founders of the Eureka Springs School of the Arts, where most of our students are adults. It is common in our adult classes for students to say, “I didn’t know I could do that.” And in that they describe a very important discovery of the truth about themselves as well as about the world. The pursuit of beauty and of truth provides the foundation for a just, equitable, and intelligent society.

In my life as a craftsman, the customers who have most encouraged my growth have all been those who have in some way benefited from the kind of education involvement in the crafts provides. They are the ones who recognize the value of my work and invest in me. Those who know the pitfalls and travails of craftsmanship and its deep interconnectedness with the growth of the individual also know the importance of encouraging the arts in our society at large.

When I was a college student, a mentor helped me restore an antique Ford. As we were working, he said to me that my brains were in my hands. That seemed an extraordinary observation, and I took it to heart, becoming a potter and then transitioning into wood. In 2001 I applied to a foundation for funding to add woodworking to the curriculum where my daughter had gone to school since preschool. We launched the Wisdom of the Hands program based on the recognition that everything we learn in every subject might be deepened and enhanced by participation in crafts. In elementary school we made puppets, dinosaurs, toy trucks, and trains. We made musical instruments and studied the history of our town and nation by marking years on the stump of the tulip poplar tree that was cut down in front of the library. We built boats. We made weather instruments and collection boxes for rocks and minerals. We built a wooden periodic table of the elements with compartments holding actual samples of the elements (even rare ones, though not the radioactive ones) collected over time. And, yes, we made birdhouses, lots of them. Everything we learn in school can be made more relevant, more meaningful, and more effective when learned hands-on, and nearly any craft can be used in this way.

In each town and city in North America, there are artisans whose hands would be useful in shaping education in a more meaningful and effective direction. Let us put them to use. Invite them into schools and let the transformation begin.

In 2022 I retired from teaching woodworking K–12 at the Clear Spring School in Northwest Arkansas. Education there is hands-on, as the school recognizes the necessity of such learning. In my retirement years I’ll continue to call, “All hands on deck.” The hands are symbolic of the whole person deeply engaged, saving the ship, doing what all of us, adults and children alike, are hardwired to do—learn. Teaching could be transformed and enhanced if schools put the crafts back at the heart of learning, making the experience more fun and interesting to kids, and teaching them to value themselves and each other in ways that can be learned only through the tactile engagement of the senses. As we think together about how to design education for our century and beyond, I suggest we take our own hands into greater consideration.