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Handwork and Intellectual Development

by Eugene Schwartz

Adapted from Millennial Child (Anthroposophic Press)

            Out of natural insight, many ancient peoples connected weaving, braiding, and knot-tying with the development of the intellect and wisdom.  Isis, the female deity of Egypt who exemplified wisdom, disguised her identity to wander on the earth until she was discovered as she taught a princess to braid her hair.  Athena, who was born out of the head of Zeus and ruled over the world of thoughts, was also the patron of weaving.  The preponderance of braid-like and woven strands in temple paintings and ritual sites in New Mexico, northern and southern Africa, Peru and central Asia suggest a link between the activities of weaving and braiding and humanity’s aspirations to an independent life of thinking.

             In the Middle Ages, a third craft arose to take its place alongside weaving and braiding.  Although the origins of knitting are obscure, old woodcuts and medieval illuminations place its ascendance in Europe at about the same time that the game of chess and the mathematical approach of algebra became known to Westerners.  Indeed, among the earliest knitted textiles discovered in Europe are two Islamic-inspired knitted cushions, whose patterns one of whose patterns suggests castles on a chessboard.[1]  It is significant that the most intellectual of games and the most cognitive approach to numerical problems accompanied the development or knitting.  It was as though a new degree of adeptness in the hand had to go side by side with newly-discovered capacities in the head.

            Recent neurological research tends to confirm that mobility and dexterity in the fine motor muscles, especially in the hand, may stimulate cellular development in the brain, and so strengthen the physical foundation of thinking.  The work done over the past seventy-five years in hundreds of Waldorf schools worldwide, in which first graders learn to knit before they learn to write or manipulate numbers, has also proven successful in this regard.  The learning disabilities specialist Jean A. Ayres states that “Praxis, or the ability to program a motor act, shows a close relation to reading skills, even though reading would appear to be only distantly related to goal-directed movement of the body.”  Citing the research of Strauss and Werner, she notes that “Children with finger agnosia [awkwardness and lack of control] made more errors on a test of arithmetical ability than did children without finger agnosia.”[2]

             Waldorf schools were, of course, not the first schools to bring knitting to children, but they were unique in the way in which knitting was linked to children’s developmental stages, and integrated with the rest of the curriculum.  The heyday of knitting in schools had actually occurred somewhat before the first Waldorf school was founded, when soldiers suffering in the harsh trenches of World War I

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