At the start of this year, I was tired of learning about bugs, plants and animals. I felt like it’s all we had been talking about in the preschool years. So this year for science, I bought an earth sciences curriculum from Real Science Odyssey. We have had a happy break from worms and seeds and instead we learned about plate tectonics, earthquake preparedness, fossils, fossil fuels, and weather.
In one of our units, we learned about geological time, how old the earth is, and how long humans (modern homo sapiens) have been on the earth. Only 300,000 years out of 4.54 billion. Just a tiny smudge of time. And of the time that humans have been on the earth, we’ve only had the ability to immerse ourselves in a digital world, devoid of materiality, since about 2010, when smartphones connected us 24/7 to an online social infrastructure. So 14 years. Out of 300,000. 14 years out of 4.56 billion years. It’s kind of mind-boggling.
Yes, we use earth’s materials to engineer a phone with a screen and computer chips to open this digital world for us – but we aren’t aware that we are interacting with aluminum, magnesium, titanium, sodium silicate, polycarbonate, zirconium, and lithium when we use these objects. Our awareness is immersed in an invisible, intangible world that is more than our imaginations, because others are immersed in it with us. This has only been very recently possible.
For most of our human history on earth, our ancestors interacted closely with the materials the earth provided. Our species has thrived on this planet because it has been able to modify materials better than any other species.
Many animals modify the land. For examples, birds build nests and beavers modify the earth’s environment quite substantially in building their dams and their homes. To do so, they use specifically adapted body parts as tools. Other animals use found objects as tools and some will even modify an object to make a better tool: Sea otters will use rocks or shells to break open shellfish or dislodge food; Crows will modify sticks or metal wire to impale larvae. Chimpanzees will tear the leaves off a leafy twig to fish termites from a hole in the ground. Yet, no species has modified or used tools as extensively as humans. Even our early human ancestors were using stone tools as early as 2.6 million years ago. For much of human history, we lived with an extensive material intelligence – an intimate knowledge of earth’s materials and how we could use them to better our chances of survival.
Now, unlike most of my human ancestors, I don’t live with a daily concern of how I’m going to stay safe from wind, rain, sun, and predators. My life in suburban California consists of driving a car to the grocery store to choose food from a shelf and bring back to my temperature-controlled and comfortable home with a 40-year roof over my head. Yet, I am still a human being, and I’m still vulnerable to all the ways the earth could kill me.
I don’t know the first thing about killing a chicken and preparing it from a feathered cute animal into something I can eat smothered in teriyaki sauce.
I only know how to grow a potato because of the last few years of learning about seeds with my preschool-aged kids. And I know I cannot grow one faster than I would starve to death.
As a human species, we are more vulnerable to very quick extinction than probably any other time in our history and it is because we have lost much of the material intelligence on how to use what the earth gives us right where we lay our heads down to sleep to survive another day.
Now I don’t want my kids to have an anxiety-disorder that the world as they know it is going to end. I don’t live a prepper-in-a-bunker lifestyle. I don’t want to go back to life without digital technology and global connectivity. But as the pandemic taught me, the world order can change rapidly. New technologies (like AI) come on the scene and they disrupt and change everything about the way we live. Are my kids going to be resourceful enough to adapt to whatever life throws at them? Do they know how to use various tools and materials to their advantage? Can they think of solutions? Can they figure out where a mistake occurred and how to fix it? Can they do useful household things?
I don’t really ache with a nostalgia for our pre-modern life. I like my modern conveniences. I’m not about to get rid of them. Many homeschoolers are also homesteaders, which I find admirable – but no part of me wants a chicken coop. I like buying clean eggs at the grocery store. That being said though, I do think the least I could do is teach my kids some skills for how to survive on this planet without these modern conveniences, and also learn them myself (haha!)
Material Intelligence
Part of learning handicrafts is learning that material intelligence. It is learning how to use tools and materials from our environment to survive and to thrive. As we’ve become more and more immersed in a digital existence, our material intelligence has disappeared. Alexander Langlands, author of Craeft, writes “What I saw as a wider knowledge – one that enabled us to exist in a world where our suspense and survival depended on our interaction with the materials we have at our disposal – was slowly slipping from our grasp.”
Not only do we not have the knowledge of materials that even our parents had, we are less aware of the physical space around us as we enter more and more into a digital meta verse. The digital world allows us to escape our physical existence. As I write this, I am on an airplane and pretending I am not on an airplane. When we escape our physicality, it feels less pressing to improve it. As I’ve been living through renovation chaos, I find myself wanting more and more to disappear into my phone to disappear from the reality of the clutter.
Glenn Adamson, author of Fewer, Better Things, addresses this use of the digital world to escape our physical reality. He writes, “The problem is not so much that the digital world is “unreal”. Rather, it is that we constantly have half our attention in the digital world and half of it in the physical world, so that we are never truly concentrating on either. If we are to combat this tendency, if we want to get ourselves undistracted, we need to remember (or relearn) what it is to truly be with objects around us….Attending to our material surroundings means stopping and slowing down.” – Adamson, Fewer Better Things p. 112-113
This is my constant battle -to reclaim my attention from the digital world back into my real world. To slow down. To focus less on completing digital tasks and more on the person and the tangible work in front of me.
Being in the Real with our Children
In handicrafts we learn how to use a variety of tools and materials with our bodies and minds. Charlotte Mason wanted kids to learn how to hold, manipulate and use a variety of tools, improving their fine motor skills including grip strength and hand-eye coordination. Charlotte Mason thought children should be exposed to many textures and develop familiarity with different kinds of materials. We have so many materials on this planet! What does it feel like to work with fabric, wool, wood, paper, leather, stone, bone, or metal?
Most of the time when we think of craft, we think of our hands as the main body part that we use to do the action – hence the name handicraft containing the word hand. But our whole bodies are immersed in the crafting experience – sometimes using foot pedals to operate machinery, standing or sitting, turning our heads or torsos back and forth as we make. Our minds are reading patterns, piecing shapes, planning ahead, and problem solving. Knowing about these materials and how to make with them makes us more resourceful. We can come up with genius solutions to small problems in our daily lives.
One of the most ubiquitous tools in childhood life is the pencil and we spend an inordinate number of hours learning how to write with one. There are so many other tools that kids need to learn to use – and most will learn how to use many of these in their every day lives by observing, trying, and improving gradually. We put our kids in the way of learning to ride bicycles and scooters, they learn to write with fountain pens, to color with markers, to smudge with pastels, to paint with paintbrushes, to cut with scissors, to sweep with a broom. They learn to whisk eggs, hammer nails, staple paperwork, and shred cheese.
But in our increasingly digital world where video games and television dominate many hours of home lives, can we honestly say that these tasks are being taught?
Sometimes I feel that my life verges too much on the digital and I crave working with my hands as almost an antidote and a reminder of all that I’m capable of doing. My eyes, that spend so much time looking at a glowing screen a mere foot from my face, or even at the objects inside my home only a few feet away, crave seeing the horizon and big expanses of sky. My body feels like it needs to move in all the ways it knows how. It needs to do more than just push buttons.
“My whole body needs to sew.” – Violet, age 6
This week my daughter wanted to sew after school. I was busy doing a bunch of things for our home and renovation, and I kept postponing pulling out all the sewing stuff. My daughter would not let it go. She said “Mom, my whole body needs to sew. It was like she was vibrating with the craving to pull out her collection of fabrics, touch them all, iron them, cut them, pin them, sew them. Putting aside my to-do list and entering into the real tactile world of creating with her ended up being one of the best afternoons we’ve had together in a long time. I guess my whole body needed to sew too.
Handicrafts Travel Through Time
We have remarkable bodies that are capable of completing millions of different tasks. It is a shame to use our amazingly evolved bodies that can run, climb, pinch, push, pull, grip, tighten, rub, tap, twist, walk, jump and more to just sit and swipe up with our thumb. Craftsmanship and making is not just making objects with our hands – but an engaged practice and an interaction with materials in our immediate surroundings with our whole bodies and minds.
Craftsmanship is also communicating across time, outside of our immediate surroundings with those who have gone before us and left patterns and instructions for how to create. In this way we connect with our human history.
In December, I will set up our Christmas decorations, and when I do, I will pull out our family’s Christmas stockings. We each have a stocking knit by our grandmothers: I have a stocking knit by my grandma Crewe; my husband has a stocking knit by his grandma Nielsen; my kids have stockings knit by their grandma Dunphy. The part that I love the most about these stockings is that these three women all used the same pattern. Two of these grandmas are now deceased and the other living with dementia , but because of the pattern and the passing down of material culture in a written form, I will someday be able to knit my grandchild a stocking using the same pattern, even though the women who could have taught me are no longer with me.
As I teach my daughter to sew, she is not only learning how to move her hands to make the needle move the way she wants to and problem solve how to fix mistakes – she is learning how to read patterns and how to follow instructions to piece things together. She is learning how to understand information communicated from one person to another and a passing down of material intelligence over generations. She is connecting with human history.
And I just think that’s worth learning.
Warmly,
-Heather
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Enjoyed this post? Check out some of my other recent posts!
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