Handcrafts have an important role in the Steiner Curriculum. Each project provides an opportunity for the child to develop new skills, be creative and tap into beauty. Craft work also develops character – patience, resilience, care, thoroughness, etc.
It also develops the brain. May we share with you an article by
Matti Bergstrom, a professor and neurophysiologist from Sweden, said the following:
The density of nerve endings in our fingertips is enormous. Their discrimination is almost as good as that of our eyes. If we don’t use our fingers, if in childhood and youth we become “finger-blind,” this rich network of nerves is impoverished – which represents a huge loss to the brain and thwarts the individual’s all-around development. Such damage may be likened to blindness itself. Perhaps worse, while a blind person may simply not be able to find this or that object, the finger-blind cannot understand its inner meaning and value.
If we neglect to develop and train our children’s fingers and the creative form building capacity of their hand muscles, then we neglect to develop their understanding of the unity of things; we thwart their aesthetic and creative powers.
Those who shaped our age-old traditions always understood this. But today, Western civilization, an information-obsessed society that overvalues science and undervalues true worth, has forgotten it all. We are “value-damaged.”
The philosophy of our upbringing is science-centered, and our schools are programmed toward that end… These schools have no time for the creative potential of the nimble fingers and hand, and that arrests the all-round development of our children – and of the whole community.
Cited from – “Will Developed Intelligence”, by David Mitchell and Patricia Livingstone
From Ruth – Education Coordinator