JTE v2n1 - 'Doing' Craft
Volume 2, Number 1
Fall 1990
"Doing" Craft
Richard D. Lakes
Technology educators have distanced
themselves from industrial arts practitioners
with fashionable messages that deny the use-
fulness of a handicrafts-based curriculum in
today's push for technological literacy. At
this time in the evolution of the field, it
may be useful to briefly discuss the assump-
tions that once fashioned an alliance between
industrial education and handicraft labor.
Students might derive a greater understanding
of the importance of this connection in
project assignments which use the handtools
of our artisan heritage, a pedagogical proc-
ess called "doing" craft.
The idea of "doing" craft may simply
suggest that execution is more important than
expression. For example, Clyde Jones, a
North Carolinian folk artist, litters his
front lawn with assorted animals he creates
from logs. This yard artist, unschooled in
the practices of fine woodworking, uses a
chainsaw to shape the figures he crafts.
Jones, like others who engage in whittling,
for instance, view the outcome of their work
as subordinate to the immediate pleasures
they gain from creation (Condon, 1990). It
is not just therapy to forget your pending
economic or social difficulties, and seek
emotional release in the manipulation of
tools and materials. Rather, craftsmanship
offers a unification of art and labor. Lewis
Mumford (1952) eloquently describes the aes-
thetic process in handicrafts when he writes:
He [craftsman] took his own time about
his work, he obeyed the rhythms of his
own body, resting when he was tired,
reflecting and planning as he went
along, lingering over the parts that
interested him most, so that, though
his work proceeded slowly, the time
that he spent on it was truly life
time. The craftsman, like the artist,
lived in his work, for his work, by his
work; and the effect of art was merely
to heighten and intensify these natural
organic processes--not to serve as mere
compensation or escape (p. 62).
Craft labor, therefore, is an art form
relying upon the intuitive and tactile
senses, or personal knowledge, as Michael
Polanyi (1958) has noted, of its practition-
ers. The craft labor of the family of in-
strument makers in Cremona, Italy, for
example, contributed to shop fabrication
practices that are unknown today because
machine-designed replication of
Stradivarius's violins and the chemical anal-
ysis of his varnishes fail to uncover the
mysteries of this master instrument maker.
The highest level of artistic development
among skilled crafts workers is
connoisseurship, Polyani has suggested, and
connoisseurship does not require scientific
prescription (or technological innovation) in
order for practitioners to successfully en-
gage in their work. "Rules of art can be
useful," Polanyi (1958) has written, "but
they do not determine the practice of an art;
they are maxims, which can serve as a guide
to an art only if they can be integrated into
the practical knowledge of the art" (p. 50).
The work processes of medieval master
masons are a case in point. With limited ge-
ometric knowledge to guide them, skilled
masons with just hammer and chisel were able
to hew stones to exacting proportions (as
well as design intricate stone tracery). How
did they do it? Unschooled in Euclidean
principles and stereotomic computations, the
cathedral builders had a series of primitive
construction aids to help them: steel square,
wooden template, and string lines. Still,
gothic construction was quite detailed, and
these remarkably talented men, unable to un-
derstand the underlying mathematical princi-
ples of vault construction, nevertheless
managed to erect their memorials to God
(Shelby, 1972).
Artisans in general may follow some sci-
entific rules but more often rely upon their
personal knowledge to ensure accuracy in "do-
ing" craft. The ability to "hear" one's
trade, for instance, helps a carpenter gauge
when nails are driven tightly into wood. A
plasterer's trowel "chatters" when the mate-
rial is workable to a smooth surface. The
wheelwright listens for a sound when applying
hot iron to the cold wheel: a "pop" says that
the cooled tire has contracted firmly onto
the wooden rim and the spokes have drawn up
tightly in their felloes. There are no rules
of science here; craft knowledge is developed
from long-standing practices -- the folk tra-
dition. "Reasoned science for us did not ex-
ist" (p. 19), wrote George Sturt in The
Wheelwright's Shop (1923), an autobiography
of his craft business in rural England. He
continues:
A good wheelwright knew by art but not
by reasoning the proportion to keep be-
tween spokes and felloes; and so too a
good smith knew how tight a two-and-a-
half inch tyre should be made for a
five-foot wheel and how tight for a
four-foot, and so on. He felt it, in
his bones. It was a perception with
him. But there was no science in it;
no reasoning. Every detail stood by
itself, and had to be learnt either by
trial and error or by tradition (p.
20).
Still, the time came when Sturt began to re-
alize that modern production methods were
cheaper and, for economical reasons, would
displace traditional methods of workmanship
in his shop. Machine-manufactured spokes,
for instance, were readily available; hence,
Sturt purchased them for his shop instead of
having his men hand-hew spokes from aged
hardwood stock. And the installation of gas-
driven woodworking machinery in 1889 was, for
him, a much needed measure of cost effi-
ciency. Yet Sturt knew that he too was re-
sponsible for ushering out the age of craft:
And from the first day the machines be-
gan running, the use of axes and adzes
disappeared from the well-known place,
the saws and saw-pit became obsolete.
We forgot what chips were like. There,
in that one little spot, the ancient
provincial life of England was put into
a back seat (p. 201).
What can technology educators gain from
presenting their students with "doing" craft?
Because craft labor is rooted in the work
culture of artisanship, the mutuality of shop
labor, and the social organization of work
(apprentice-journeyman-master relationships),
the technology education laboratory gives
students an opportunity to develop reciprocal
exchanges of knowledge, allied decision mak-
ing, and voluntary organization of tasks and
duties. Practical application should be ac-
companied by readings in labor history, labor
laws, collective bargaining, labor-management
relations, labor union activities and member-
ship, the union label, occupational safety,
industrial democracy--all are based upon col-
lective histories of tradesworkers negoti-
ations on the shop floor. Students may need
to be reminded that the practice of job sen-
iority, for instance, was established through
craft tradition: the most valued jobs went to
the journeymen who were employed in the mas-
ter's workshop; apprentices were expected to
run errands, deliver goods, and perform cus-
todial duties for as long as one year into
their indentures before they would ever be
allowed to use a handtool.
Technology education students may bene-
fit from "doing" craft because the activity
itself may stimulate a political philosophy
of labor alliance and industrial protest. By
virtue of its handicraft basis, students en-
gaged in craft labor may begin to acknowledge
the debilitating effects of machine technol-
ogy, and seek solutions to the degradation of
industrial work on the shop floor. Craft la-
bor may be an "aesthetic - in - opposition,"
a term that Peter Dormer (1988) used to dis-
tinguish handicraft production from indus-
trial technology. For example, the lining of
a nuclear reactor and a reed basket are both
beautiful, he suggests, but the reactor's
beauty "is chilling" because it "tampers with
nature," whereas the basket is organic, "in
harmony with nature" (p. 135). Yet
handicraft production also reinforces per-
sonal relationships between crafts workers
and customers, and distinguishes itself from
the impersonality of mass consumption of
factory-manufactured goods: "With a single
piece of furniture made by a man or a woman
in a craft studio in Pennsylvania, there was
the suggestion of a personal relationship be-
tween maker and user, but with a car mass-
produced in Detroit there was not" (Dormer,
1988, p. 139).
Technology education students may de-
velop a craft ethic that places greater em-
phasis upon the importance of customer
relations in today's service economy. This
ethic, derivative of the master's social re-
lations with his purchasing public, once set
a high priority upon skillful execution of
the work, dignity of labor, honesty of tech-
niques, and integrity in choice of materials
to be used. Perhaps "doing" craft will help
students reclaim the artisan legacy: personal
service and quality workmanship go hand-in-
hand.
----------------
Richard D. Lakes is a member of the Depart-
ment of Educational Leadership, University of
Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut.
REFERENCES
Condon, K. (1990). "Learnin', through": En-
vironmental art as a creative process. In
Daniel W. Patterson & Charles G. Zug III
(Eds.) ARTS IN EARNEST: NORTH CAROLINA
FOLKLIFE. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 179-191.
Dormer, P. (1988). The ideal world of
Vermeer's little lacemaker. In John
Thackara, (Ed.), DESIGN AFTER MODERNISM:
BEYOND THE OBJECT. New York, NY: Thames
and Hudson, 135-144.
Mumford, L. (1952). ART AND TECHNICS. New
York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Polanyi, M. (1958). PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE: TO-
WARDS A POST-CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Shelby, L. (1972). The geometric knowledge
of the medieval master masons. SPECULUM,
47(2), 395-421.
Sturt, G. (1923). THE WHEELWRIGHT'S SHOP.
(Reprint, 1988.) Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Permission is given to copy any
article or graphic provided credit is given and
the copies are not intended for sale.
Journal of Technology Education Volume 2, Number 1 Fall 1990