Art and Craft in the Middle School

Abstract

'Go about your work placidly, unhurriedly taking time to make your products comely. '

I have never known the origin of that quotation but it sums up for me all that is best in good craftmanship and epitomises the attitude that I have sought, in forty years of teaching, to foster in children of Middle School years. Welive in a machine age, one indeed in which there are very real and understandable fears of the effects of automation on personal identity, but the use of a high-speed drill in place of an auger need not thereby occasion the loss of this spirit of pleasurable enjoyment in creating - the joy of making rather than of possessing.

I am concerned with the teaching of the age range 10 to 13, mostly, but not exclusively, boys and in general my teaching has been in residential schools or in schools where there is a fifty-fifty balance between day - and boarding-pupils: this gives the added bonus of plenty of time outside the normal school timetable.