Yet Educational Sloyd was created for very different reasons. Rather than preparing students for industrial jobs, Sloyd classrooms sought to counteract the effects of industrialization. Sloyd was a resistance movement. The founders recognized that something was being lost among the kids of the Industrial Age–a creativity, an industriousness, a way of thinking. Once you can buy cheap versions of things you used to make, you lose the “craftiness” necessary to make objects for everyday use. The primary purpose of Educational Sloyd was never to teach kids to make things, but instead to help children develop the mental dispositions that came out of making things, like creativity, grit, and love for whatever labor you decide to undertake.
Today, as schools try to respond to the latest revolution, I see similar patterns. In this Information Age, we see an emphasis on STEM and the expansion of computer programming classes, as schools seek to fit students to the new economic and social order. At first glance, the Maker Movement might be considered part of that effort. As Clapp et al. point out in Maker-Centered Learning, educators were initially drawn to the maker classroom for two reasons. One was an economic argument that such classes would “foster the development of an anticonsumerist, do-it-yourself mindset on an individual level and spawn a wave of innovation and entrepreneurialism” (15). The second was an educational argument that the Maker Movement increases young people’s proficiency in STEM, which, of course, simply circles back to the economic argument. At first, maker classrooms groomed students for the information economy.
That said, much like the Sloyd classrooms of the nineteenth century, the Maker Movement holds deeper values that seek to oppose the modern age. When researchers look at what really goes on in maker classrooms, they discover that the primary goal of such classrooms is not to reinforce the dominant order but to cultivate among students a sense of their own agency to shape the larger order. In the face of many challenges that feel insurmountable (a capitalist system that no longer serves the people, a climate crisis that we can hardly get our arms around, a sense that reality is not as it appears on screens), maker educators aim to show students that their world is malleable—that objects, systems, and communities can be redesigned. In that sense, the Maker Movement, like Sloyd before it, is a form of resistance.
Again and again we come back to a central truth: making is a subversive act.