I've been thinking about the ways we learn when we make things and how differerent that experience is from learning in order to answer exam questions (especially multiple choice) about things, subjects, or ideas that other people have made.   What is most different is that, when you make something you learn about failure and from failure.   When you "get the answer wrong," you fail.   Therein lies all the difference.

Whether you are making a robot, a sweater, a poem, a research paper, a mod of a video game, or a donut,  the first time you do it you draw from and build upon a range of similar experiences, some of them successful, some of them not.  Trial-and-error is part of the process but so is your own, personal toolkit.   Some of those tools might be actual, physical, material tools.  Others are bodily repertoires of gestures or words or sounds or experiences.  And still others are histories of past successes and failures, some of which have direct relevance to what you are making, some of which are important simply because they remind you that you survive and even thrive after failure--and success does not stop the process of learning. In all of these settings, actually doing the process becomes a learning lab, a place of experimentation and process and exploration and (dare I say it?) fun.

I'm especially taken with futurist Alvin Toffler's idea that the literacy of the 21st century is not just reading, writing, and arithmetic  but the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn.   Unlearning doesn't thrill everyone.  Some find it profoundly disorienting to realize that what they know doesn't serve them in the present and they have to not just learn something new but get rid of a lot of baggage and start again.  But the more you spend your life making things, the more you realize that unlearning is a skill too.  It is the novice who thinks every word that issues from the pen of the expert is perfect and that as they write their first major independent project (right, dissertation students?) they have to get it perfect the first time around.   Part of great writing is being willing to chuck a lot.  Whole chapters.  Whole books.  And to realize that it is the process, the confidence that comes from both learning and unlearning (together) that allows one to relearn and achieve.

In his marvelous book Shop Class as Soulcraft, political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew B. Crawford argues that in the 1990s shop classes were abandoned all over America in favor of computer classes, training students for the technologies of the future.   Quite frankly, I don't see that many computer labs--and the idea that you would substitute one for the other is tragic.  I can't think of anything that more prepares one for the process-oriented aspects of computer programming and remixing and Do-It-Yourself video and music mashups and all of the other exciting participatory aspects of learning online together than building something and shop class is a sanctioned place, within education, for doing just that. 

But here's where I depart from Crawford's diagnosis.  It wasn't just the shop class that ended in the 1990s, it was so many hands' on classes where students made things.  Excellence more and more was determined by those standardized tests, whether ACT and SAT's (as if every brilliant student had to go to college and was a failure if she did not) or, later, the "standards based education" of No Child Left Behind.   Not only did we lose shop classes but we also lost computer labs in most schools along with art classes, music classes, band, languages, and even gym.  

I personally believe that losing those classes where kids actually move around, where they don't have to sit in one place all day, looking forward at a teacher who teaches them how to give answers, may well be the biggest contributor we have not only to the high drop-out rate but to such attention diseases of our decade as ADD and ADHD.  Coupled with no longer walking to school, with the extreme limitations parents and teachers today put on kids' physical experience of play,  we have created home and school environments for the sedentary.  I mean the intellectually sedentary too.  Lack of movement, lack of process, lack of trial and error, lack of participation and getting your hands dirty, lacking of making things, making ideas, making art and music:   we've substituted a very ends-oriented idea of knowledge when digital culture should be all about how we get there, with an understanding that "there" is never finished.  It always needs updating.  Like that project in the basement that never is perfect enough,  life online is a constant, a process.  

Where in schools today do we teach kids not only how you draw upon everything you know--and that which your friends know--to make something but, once made, you then use that knowledge to move on to the next thing?  The end product is not the point.  It is the struggle and the joy of getting there.

Thank goodness that kids growing up in the digital age recognize this--more than our formal educational system does.  I love the whole DIY movement, including the hilariously artisinal SteamPunk version, all embodied in the motto of the delightful Make Magazine:  "technology on your time."  Check out the Make website online and you can find knitting kits or instructions for how to make your own 4-bit microcomputer: http://www.makezine.com/ Knitting needs are technology and so is a microcomputer.  The key?  "On your time."   Learning--and unlearning and relearning--are fun.   I can't think of anything more fundamental that are schools could be teaching than that basic principle.  Technology on your time.