January 21 McLuhan's Tools

Ever since watching the first part of McLuhan's Wake I find myself looking at the world and asking, "what part of the human body is that an extension of?" While this is fun for me it is a little frustrating for those around me. I've been forced to try and explain myself and this is the best I've come up with:

We create tools to extend our body's capacity but then the tools eventually come around to creating the world for us. How? Well, they disguise the fact that they are artificial and human creations by becoming so ingrained in our usage and understanding of the world that they become always there - natural.

The purest example of this natural - artificial nature I have found is the hammer. I had the pleasure of working at Lower Fort Garry National Historic Site as a Blacksmith/interpreter for a number of years. In so doing I became rather intimately connected to hammers, their uses and their limitations. You see, for each function - smash, shape, lengthen, shorten, spread, smooth, round, etc. - there is a special hammer or special way to use a hammer. Each tool has a specific capacity based on the desire of the wielder to make the metal behave in a certain way. Not every desire of the Blacksmith can be accomplished. If the Blacksmith could handle hot metal this would not be the case. Thus, the hammer's limited capacity influences the product. In time, smiths don't even think about how to create something from scratch as if from their own hands. Rather, the hammer becomes the lens through which possible becomes envisioned and the fact that the hammer is a creation and not natural becomes forgotten. The questions stops being what can I (with my hands) do to shape this metal and becomes what can my hammer do

Significantly, if one desires to become a real bonafide smith (and not an interpreter at a historic site) one of the first tasks undertaken is the creation of a personal set of tools. Through this process the smith learns that the tool is in fact artificial and thus changeable. This restores the full creative potential to the practitioner. The smith can once again look at a lump of metal and imagine shaping it with his/her hand and then set about solving the problem of how to create tools to suit his/her purpose rather than have his/her imagination limited by the tool.

So, how does this apply to curriculum? Good question. Blacksmithing functions as a useful place to "hammer out" (sorry) this McLuhan business because the relationship between practitioner and tool is relatively simple. Teaching is removed from this simplicity both because of the years of technological developments between smithy and classroom and by the fact that teaching is mind work rather than hand work. However, curricula are one of the chief tools of the classroom and thus must share in the hammer's ability to both advance a practitioner's aim and to limit his/her imaginative possibilities. Maybe, like the novice smith, teachers should spend some time imagining a curricula free classroom. From such a position all the possibilities for learning would be available. From such a position there would only be a teacher and students. What would we do?

Maybe this: