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Sloyd

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131 pointstroydavis38 comments

Ah yes, many are the cupboards filled with butterknives made in woodshop and the sofa's with an odd shitty pillow made in sewing class. Still better than the Lord of the flies -like gymclasses though :)

Fun fact, I don't think I ever had a träslöjdslärare (wood chop teacher) that had all appendixes intact. I surmised that sacrifing a finger must be part of some kind of initiation ritual for Sloyd teachers.

Oh, the many christmas presents made in slöjd! As the saying goes, "Ärad var gud i höjden, det här har jag gjort i slöjden". ("Prized be the lord in heaven, I've made this in slöjden" could be a best-effort translation)

Roy Underhill covered this in an episode of the "Woodwright's Shop." It's a PBS program in the US.

http://www.pbs.org/woodwrightsshop/home/

Season 30, Episode 7 (and repeated as Season 37, Episode 1) is "Who wrote the book of Sloyd?"

Available at http://www.pbs.org/video/the-woodwrights-shop-who-wrote-the-...

Also worth noting Season 30, Episode 10 may be of interest as it covers manual training in England. "The Tiny Tool Kit" is tied to Christopher Schwarz's reprint and update of "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker".

Ha! A long-term mystery has been solved for me. When I was a kid I encountered a tool called a "sloyd knife", which seemed like a really weird name. Now I know -- it's not weird, just Swedish. :-)

Years ago one of the brothers on Car Talk said that at his school when he was a kid, the remedial students who mostly shop work were called “Sloyds” and he never knew why. Now after years, and after his death sadly, I have the answer.

We actually just call them "smörkniv", with the litteral meaning of "butter knife". :)

A sloyd knife is not the same as a butter knife. You use a sloyd knife while making a butter knife. Sloyd knife in Swedish is "slöjdkniv".

> The word "sloyd" is derived from the Swedish word Slöjd, which translates as crafts, handicraft, or handiwork.

but the origin is

> Old Swedish slöghþ, from slögher (“skill, knowledge, handiness”)

( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sl%C3%B6jd#Etymology_2 )

which in Norwegian gave rise to words like "sløg" (smart, sneaky, cunning) and "slesk" (slimy, obsequious).

> which in Norwegian gave rise to words like "sløg" (smart, sneaky, cunning) and "slesk" (slimy, obsequious).

Swedish: "slug", and "slemmig" I guess.

Reminds me of a bit from Cryptonomicon:

"So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears a helmet, carries a shield called Aegis, and is the goddess of war and of wisdom, as well as crafts—such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was supposed to be the god of war and Hestia the goddess of home economics—why the redundancy? But a lot’s been screwed up in translation. See, the kind of wisdom that we associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I’m trying to impart to you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dike by the Greeks. That’s not what Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness, and which you’ll recall was the name of her mother in one version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute) provided young Zeus with the potion that caused Cronus to vomit up all of the baby gods he’d swallowed, setting the stage for the whole Titanomachia. So now the connection to crafts becomes obvious—crafts are just the practical application of metis."

"I associate the word ‘crafts’ with making crappy belts and ashtrays in summer camp," Randy says. "I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?"

"It’s all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology."

I took an extension course at the North Bennet Street School, the historic home of Sloyd in the United States. If you're in Boston and at all interested in craft, I highly recommend it; the teachers are wonderful, and it allowed me to exercise parts of my mind that I rarely do as a software engineer.

I took a number of bookbinding workshops there, and I also would recommend it highly. Everything about that experience was amazing.

I wish the link for "The Russian System" didn't just go to an article about education in Russia. I definitively remember having some sort of woodworking class in Russia, where I had to use a chisel to build a boat. (I remember understanding working with vs. against the grain when I split my poor little attempt in half along the center.) I wonder how it differs.

In Italy the middle school (age 11-14) included "Technical Applications", which AFAICT was the same thing, i.e. crafts. Boys and girls would have different subjects though.

This lasted between 1963 (the year this unified middle school was introduced, previously there were specific work-oriented schools) and 1979 (they year the subject became a more theoretical "Technical Education", and unisex).

Russia has the same system, and at least 10 years ago it still wasn't unisex. Boys' crafts included woodworks and metalworks, while girls learned cooking and sewing.

But we never got to do anything. Wr had a room of wood- and metalworking appliances that got turned on maybe once per months. Laziness + risk aversion = paperwork instead of handiwork. We goofed around mostly.

Was absolute waste of a good idea.

Those were pretty good classes, I enjoyed them. Learned to use a coping saw, some wood and metal working. We had a lathe there and all. Some of that I had learned from my dad, but we just didn't have a lathe or those other tools and materials at home.

Our classes also included doing demolition. The school was being remodeled so they gave us hammers and pick axes and told us to go wild on a few walls. Totally unhealthy and risky. But it was an exciting activity for a bunch of 14 year olds.

Another time the teacher told to "go and get these bricks from that construction site, so and so will let you in". Looking back I am pretty sure, he was sending us to steal after he cut a deal with the guard.

Oh and also other class was told to cut some trees. Those trees were not on the school property.

Then teacher came drunk to class a few times.

Good times, good times...

At my junior high school outside of Cleveland, Ohio, the boys had wood shop in 7th grade and metal shop in 8th grade. Girls took "home economics", cooking and perhaps sewing. This was in 1967 through 1969. I don't know what the schools there teach now.

I was at high school (13-17yo) in Australia from around 1990-1994. We had Tech Studies which included three separate components: woodwork, metalwork and plastics. We also did Home Economics which included basic cookery, sewing, etc. Both boys and girls undertook these same classes. From memory, there was one year where this was compulsory (14-15yo or so) and then people interested in more tended to specialise in later years of high school or leave at 15 to take on a trade apprenticeship.

I think school age students would benefit from more subjects like this as part of their formative years, learning basic practical and finance skills.

My middle school in the USA (Texas, in particular) included a 'Technical Applications' curriculum. As of ~2001-2004, this included:

Level 1: basic computer (Windows and Mac OS) usage, desktop productivity/publishing apps (Microsoft Office), and basic digital photography and image/video editing (Adobe Creative Suite).

Level 2: HTML, JavaScript, advanced image/video editing (again, Adobe Creative Suite)

Level 3: PHP, AppleScript, apprenticeship handling low-level technical support issues and IT operations tasks for the school district

Level 1 was obligatory for all students. Levels 2 and 3 were available for 2nd and 3rd year Middle School students that wished to continue the progression. Very few opportunities aside from typical digital arts or compsci options were available at the high school level afterwards.

Most (65% or better) of my peers that took the 2nd and 3rd level Tech Apps courses are now employed in some sort of IT role.

When I was in high school here in Scotland in the late 70s and early 80s we did quite a lot of interesting stuff: metalwork, woodwork, technical drawing. I was absolutely terrified of using the lathe though.... welding was fun.

However, my absolute favourite courses were navigation and seamanship - I was gutted that I had to drop these to continue with French which I thought (incorrectly) I needed to get into university.

Back when I was a kid we called this "industrial arts".

I was President of my high school’s Industrial Arts Club circa 2001. Until this comment I had never seen or heard anyone else use the term.

Since my graduation the school has closed down the wood shop and metal shop...and when my old teacher retires in the next couple years they will no longer offer drafting either (of course we lost our T-square desks my junior year for computers and autocad).

In Australian public high schools (finished 1999) at least in NSW (ie. Sydney) the drafting part was called Technical Drawing, a design theory (materials, etc.) part was called Design and Technology, and then there were separate classes for Woodwork and Metalwork. I used to really enjoy all of them, and aced Technical Drawing and Woodwork. Years later, after a 15 year career spanning various types of software all around the world, I find myself in China doing a hardware startup, and all of that Technical Drawing theory and machining experience has really come back to help! I can't thank Australia enough for a good public secondary education.

This is the principle of just about every commercially successful "casual" game. The difference is that most games don't teach you anything useful outside of the context of the game.

I mean, it has a different name, but surely every nation in the world has similar classes with similar content?

In the UK the GCSE Design and Technology syllabus covers all of the bases mentioned in the article as a standard part of the National Curriculum for every child.

http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/design-and-technology/gcse/de...

The article is written as if there’s something special about it unique to Scandinavia, beyond its name.

The US does not have anything like this in its mandatory public school curriculum that I know of. My experience in a good public system was that if you had time in your schedule to take a shop class (wood and metal working) it was because you weren't taking a foreign language or music class. Same problem with art -- there was no room built in to accommodate those classes in a typical student's schedule.

Hmmm. Odd. I took all the above. Maybe our classes were shorter (~50min each)? Or we had longer days (7.30am to 3.30pm and then the extracurriculars started)?

I and the other students from the AP classes at my school effectively had no electives -- we all took math, science, English, history, a foreign language, and at least one music class every semester of every year throughout middle and high school. With 6 classes a day and extra curricular sports, robotics and music there was no way to take a shop or home-ec class, and that's after getting arts and gym waived.

> and at least one music class every semester of every year throughout middle and high school

Seriously? I'm all for music in schools, did a fair bit myself, and went to a public school with a strong program... but 14+ semesters of required music seems like overkill for most people.

I went to my city's "public school you need to test into" (so it was very big on academics) and it still had a shop class.

We had a shop class. What we didn't have was time to take it without skipping out on another core class. This should be required curriculum -- that was the point I took home from the article.

States and school districts still have a fair amount of control over curricula, so "the US" does mandate hands-on classes in some places. My high school had a mandatory shop class (student's choice of woods or metals). Middle school had mandatory home ec for all genders.

We didn't skip out on another class, it was just part of the curriculum. This was 8th grade, and I transferred out after that year, so I don't know what they did in High School.

I went to a regular public school and we had a mandatory program called 'Life Skills' that served roughly this purpose in 8th grade. It wasn't a full class though. As I recall it was 2 hours each Friday afternoon for a semester and everyone rotated through a few sub-classes: cooking, wood shop, sewing, and mechanical drawing.

Not at similar age with similar intent, no.

Man, looking back I kinda wish I'd taken DT over some other subject as one of my GCSEs. Probably music.

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