A guide to living fully and humanely by learning the wisdom of authentic manual work. Most of us modern people live in a world of constant abstraction, immersed in our heads and our screens. But there is a deeper wisdom in working with your hands in the real world. In The Wisdom of Our Hands, craftsman and educator Doug Stowe shows how working with handcrafts, either professionally or as a hobby, is essential for a full education and a full life. Based on his 45 years as a woodworker and 20 years as a teacher of handcrafts, Stowe argues that human beings have a natural need to express themselves creatively through tangible work. The use of one's hands and whole body to make physical things promotes both physical and mental health and fosters a sense of mastery in both young and adult students. A life of craftsmanship is also an opportunity and obligation to define one's own values. Drawing on his experiences living and working in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a town dedicated to handcrafts and arts, Stowe demonstrates how craft work creates community, forges deeper social bounds, and fosters a saner attitude about the value of relative value of human labor and material goods. A quietly radical and spiritual blueprint for a deeper and more connected way of life, The Wisdom of Our Hands is a transformational book.

Timeless words of wisdom from the eighteenth-century teacher who transformed the world of education with his groundbreaking ideas. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi rose to prominence during the Age of Enlightenment, bringing the spirit of equal opportunity and respect for human personality into the classroom, just as Thomas Jefferson imbued such virtues into the Declaration of Independence. The foundation of Pestalozzi’s educational philosophy rested on six principles: the inner dignity of the individual; the promise of potential in each child; love as the basis of education (as opposed to punishment); his doctrine of Anschauung, experience-based learning; appropriate action following Anschauung, and an emphasis on repetition of said action. This philosophical grounding influenced the great remaking of American education from 1830 to 1860, resulting in changes that have been felt through the centuries and remain relevant today. The Education of Man gathers Pestalozzi’s enduring thoughts on subjects as wide-ranging as humanity, teaching, poverty, justice, truth, and nature, including such observations as . . . People are led by custom and catchwords, but facts they are wont to overlook. The man who seeks to rule as a father before he has learned to love as a brother will never be a patriarch. Sooner or later, but of a certainty in the end, Nature will take her toll for what men do against her. Learning is not worth a penny when courage and joy are lost along the way. The world grows poor in seeking to avoid poverty; the man who strives for riches most earnestly is seen to be the poorest.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1894 Edition.

Gertrude the albino frog learns that special, forever friends come in all shapes and sizes.

Those Good Gertrudes explores the professional, civic, and personal roles of women teachers throughout American history. Its voice, themes, and findings build from the mostly unpublished writings of many women and their families, colleagues, and pupils. Geraldine J. Clifford studied personal history manuscripts in archives and consulted printed autobiographies, diaries, correspondence, oral histories, interviews—even film and fiction—to probe the multifaceted imagery that has surrounded teaching. This broad ranging, inclusive, and comparative work surveys a long past where schoolteaching was essentially men's work, with women relegated to restricted niches such as teaching rudiments of the vernacular language to young children and socializing girls for traditional gender roles. Clifford documents and explains the emergence of women as the prototypical schoolteachers in the United States, a process apparent in the late colonial period and continuing through the nineteenth century, when they became the majority of American public and private schoolteachers. The capstone of Clifford’s distinguished career and the definitive book on women teachers in America, Those Good Gertrudes will engage scholars in the history of education and women’s history, teachers past, present, and future, and readers with vivid memories of their own teachers. "Clifford's book is a timely blessing, the history of teachers are at last accorded their own integrity instead of as appendages in other fields of study."—San Francisco Book Review "Clifford’s colleagues around the world have long anticipated Those Good Gertrudes. They will find the wait exceedingly worthwhile. The book’s scope and depth can now incite new generations of students to reflect on and investigate the repercussions of teaching and learning—activities still driven essentially by women both in the U.S. and globally."—Donald R. Warren, Indiana University "Those ‘Good Gertrudes’—the women who dedicated some part of their lives to teaching—finally have a great historian to tell this important, missing story. Professor Geraldine J. Clifford has brought together an intense combination of extended research, fresh archival information, and the insightful interpretation that only wisdom can bring to scholarship. This stands as a landmark work in the social history of education."—John R. Thelin, author of A History of American Higher Education The first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in education, Geraldine J. Clifford is professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Institutions, 1870–1937.