Intelligent Hands: Why making is a skill for life

Stroud Book Festival event 

Intelligent Hands: Why making is a skill for life, is a rallying call for practical education, why we don’t value it and what are the benefits. What if becoming an apprentice was as celebrated as going to university? What is it about the mind that is considered more worthy than the hand? What is it that got us to this place and how can we change it? Join local authors, Charlotte Abrahams and Katy Bevan and guests to hear about why making is good for you.  

Event is part of Stroud Book festival and hosted by local publising company, Quickthorn.

Intelligent Hands was published in september 2023 and will be available to purchase at the event.

Find Intelligent Hands: Why making is a skill for life in the online bookshop here.

Recent years have seen a decline in craft and creative education in schools and a shift from practical to theoretical learning models in higher education. Young people are leaving school with no idea that craft-based careers are even possible, and graduates of craft-based degree courses are entering the workplace with so few hand skills that their employers must train them from scratch.

Where did the idea come from that white-collar work should be rewarded more with money and status than that of a blue-collar worker? Intelligent Hands looks at this phenomenon, the historical precedents that led us here and why hand skills are crucial in education and for lifelong learning.

 The authors are on a mission to enlighten the uninitiated and persuade the nay-sayers who dismiss craft as no more than a nice hobby or believe that doing things with your hands is for those who can’t use their heads. And for the converted, we offer more grist to your mills, ammunition for funding applications, inspiration for those who plan school curricula and further reading for your speciality.

Intelligent Hands brings existing research and information together in an accessible format for those for those who don’t have time to trawl through all the information that is already out there. With a brief look at the history of practical education, we have collated some of the research that has been done in disparate fields to show that combining physical ways of learning with the conceptual in education is the way forward.

We include the personal stories of ten people who have discovered that working with their hands has improved their quality of life. Through the three sections of the book – The nature of work; Education and learning; Community; Health and wellbeing – we look at how physical labouring became separated from academic study, how we became divorced from the materials that surround us and the important role that the crafts and creativity have to play in education, not just for the lower streams, but for everyone. In short, how making is a skill for life.