How Plato Screwed the Craftsperson

(Leonardo da Vinci as Plato, detail of The School of Athens by Raphael)

I used to spend my summers as a bike mechanic, once the teaching year had ended.  Lots of folks seemed to think this an odd way for a teacher to spend a summer–why not do something related to my field of expertise, like teaching summer school?  The shops where I worked found it unusual as well.  While working for a Turkish-owned shop, the patriarch took to calling me “hodja” or “teacher.”  I even sensed that some thought the work beneath me–an educator, working with his hands!  Gasp!  But I looked forward to that work, partly as it fed my passion for bikes and bike racing, but also because of the nature of the labor.  After spending the school year working primarily with my brain, I found it cathartic to work with my hands.  Or, maybe more accurately, it was a relief to allow my brain to be “embodied,” to problem-solve through my body with my mind.  As my life changed and my interests shifted from bikes to craft, I found that carving or turning on the weekends and over vacations served a very similar role–repairing the mind/body split that modern academia expects.

But why is this unnatural mind/body hierarchy so central to schooling and Western society in general?  I would blame it on Plato (and Descartes.)  Plato argued the imperfect, changing, decaying world around us is just a copy of a perfect, timeless, and rational higher sphere, and that we should spend our time contemplating those higher forms and not their fleeting manifestations in everyday life.  This philosophy elevated the mind over the body and reason over applied skills.  It may be an oversimplification, but I can’t help but think that this is why we are left with an academia today that celebrates the “life of the mind” and casts a side-eye at trade education, why we seem to think that students learn best when seated in orderly rows, why poster projects are viewed as “easy assignments,” and why any student who does not fit such a system must be “hyperactive” or have “attention deficit.”  We have built an education system that not only poorly serves the many intelligences in our classrooms, but also fundamentally misunderstands how we learn.  We teach our children as if their minds were disembodied, instead of grasping a relatively simple truth: we learn with our hands.  

John Dewey got this.  He and other pragmatists rejected the mind/body dualism of Plato and Descartes (the “I-think-therefore-I-am” guy), and instead argued that there was a “continuity” between the body and the mind, that all of our “rational operations grow out of organic activities.” The “progressive education” that grew out of Dewy’s work recognized that rationality emerges from the body’s interaction with the environment.  Sadly, this movement did not fundamentally shift the trajectory of the American classroom, and we still teach students as if they are brains with no bodies.  

After stepping away from the high school classroom a few years ago and taking up craft and craft education full time, I find myself reflecting a lot on the Platonic and Cartesian mind/body split and how to heal that wound.  Plato had a decidedly dim view of arts and crafts.  He proposed that artists be banished from the Republic, as their messages might undermine the social hierarchy, and he placed artisans within the lowest class in his ideal society.  No wonder, as he so devalued the body and what it might teach us.  Craft education very well may be part of how we help heal this mind/body dualism.  

So, as I prepare for more craft classes, I am taking time to read about slöjd education in Scandinavian countries, and enjoying the journey.  I am also making my way through Sarah Kuhn’s Transforming Learning Through Tangible Instruction, which inspired some of this blog post.  And she asked a question that I want to leave you with: “Where do you do your best thinking?” 

I bet it is not at your desk…