Technique: How to Make Things

The mind develops in conjunction with the hand. Here we learn how to develop our hand-brain intelligence and have fun at the same time.

Note that most of how we learn in school does not properly use the hand-brain process. You mostly sit there and listen, often with very little creative writing. You can't do creative writing while listening to someone else talk, you can only take notes (a truly boring waste of time).

In school, the focus is usually upon memorization by rote, or using insipid educational games. The advent of the Apple II computer (a long time ago) gave teachers the idea that they could write computer games. They should have let the kids write the games instead, and not much lost if they were to do this all day long. Today of course, there is such a gap between game technology and what the average teacher can do that the schools and kids have become pure consumers of educational software. Some of the teachers turned into educational software entrepreneurs. Now, students mostly do word processing on their Macs under the guise of writing.

The hand is also more often than not trained in a repetitive fashion, i.e., pure technique. This is often of great utility, but it does not develop higher forms of intelligence to any great degree. For this we need to think while we use our hands.

Even if you practice a musical instrument, which requires the development of habitual skills, at some point you need to make up your own tunes. Otherwise, it may be something you discontinue when you stop taking lessons. Simply learning the technique is not enough.