MillennialChild.com

Handwork & Intellectual Development, page 2

needed scarves and gloves and clothing that was warm and protective.  Anne McDonald shares the first person experiences of an anxious English schoolgirl:

 Knitting’s the best thing to steady your nerves. The boys in our room that used to sit and fumble their ink-wells, or tap their pencils, or tinker with their rulers, or maybe flip bits of art-gum at you when somebody was reciting, are so busy with their knitting that they never fidget or behave. And the girls — my, how their knitting counts up! Pauline and Esther each knit a sweater a week and keep up with their lessons as well as ever while Guy’s the champion boy-knitter of the school. He has finished three sweater and four pairs of wristlets, and is knitting a helmet now. Helmets are hard, too, but we’ve got half a dozen boys well started on them.[1]

 For the often over-stimulated, nervous or hyperactive children at the century’s beginning, the rhythmical activity of knitting can provide a way for them to be soothed, aware of and engaged with their social peers and productive at the same time. Although American Waldorf students are not called upon to support military efforts with their handwork, they, too, can engage their will in supporting something grand in scale.  A representative project of this nature was the “Pac-Coat,” a garment assembled by eighth graders in the Green Meadow Waldorf School under the enthusiastic supervision of their teacher, Christa Montano.  Sewn by hand and machine by groups of three students (who volunteered for the project, and thus gave up the time in which they would have sewn articles of clothing for themselves), pac-coats were large garments meant to be donated to New York’s homeless population.  They were large and warm, and so designed that they could be used as sleeping bags at night, or rolled up into a backpack in the warmer months.  The coats took many weeks of work to complete, and the students who made them were invited to present them to a Manhattan homeless center, where they experienced first-hand the plight of New York’s disenfranchised population.

             What occurs when a child sets about to knit?  Needles are held in both hands, with each hand assigned its respective activity.  Laterality is immediately established, as well as the eye’s control over the hand.  From the outset, the child is asserting a degree of control over his will.  The right needle must enter a rather tightly-wound loop of yarn on the left needle, weave it through and pull it away, in the process tying a knot.  Only a steady, controlled hand can accomplish such a feat, so the power of concentration is awakened — indeed, there is no other activity performed by seven or eight year-olds that can evoke such a degree of attentiveness as knitting.  This training in concentration helps, to use a phrase of the teacher Dennis Klocek, to “teach the will to think.”  It will go far in supporting the child’s problem-solving capacities in later years.  Children who not have the opportunity to “follow the line” of yarn through its interwoven knitted knots may have difficulties when they are asked in later years to follow a line of thought.  As Jane Healy notes:          

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