1. Tuesday,
July
14,
2015
Teacher's handicrafts buoy confidence within students
By Michael Tsai POSTED: 1:30 a.m. HST, Jul 14, 2015
To the degree that his old mentors in blacksmithing, stone carving and jewelry making were masters of their waning arts, Phil
Dwyer, it may be safely argued, is masterful by association.
Dwyer, 58, teaches so-called earth arts at the Honolulu Waldorf School, passing along to his tech-incubated millennial
charges the sweat-earned skills and expertise he himself gained through one-on-one apprenticeship.
"The people I worked with had a passion for what they did, and if you were sincere and willing to do whatever it took, you
could enjoy the opportunity to associate with them and learn from them," Dwyer said. "I'm not sure if youth today have that
mindset. Things are more packaged. Educational channels are already laid out. I'm not sure if people have the inclination to
think differently about their education."
Dwyer was born and raised in Merrimack, N.H., his childhood spanning a period in which traditional rural lifestyles —
families canning their own food and sewing their own clothes — was gradually giving way to the intrusion of modern
consumer culture.
"The world changed overnight," Dwyer said.
But Dwyer, son of a leather worker, appreciated from a young age the value of what he
calls an associative education — learning through association with experts in a given
field.
He learned how to make Navajo and Zuni jewelry from a hitchhiker he met on the West
Coast. He took up silversmithing during a stint in the Appalachians, then later learned
how to make his own casting equipment from a gentleman in Atlanta.
Dwyer moved to Hawaii in 1990 and learned to farm while working at the Kahumana
Community Farm in Waianae. He later moved to Hawaii island, where he farmed produce
for the local Waldorf school. While there he took up welding as a way to save money on
equipment repairs. That eventually led to blacksmithing as a means of making his own
tools.
These days, Dwyer focuses his considerable energies toward helping students weaned on
information technology understand and appreciate the value of working with their hands
— becoming people of substance, he says, through working with materials of substance.
The process isn't always easy. Teenagers who can nimbly manipulate a smartphone are not always prepared to string a needle
or turn a screw. Yet, with hands-on experience comes confidence, and with confidence something even more wondrous.
"The more experience they have, the more ballast they have," Dwyer said. "As their comfort level rises, their creativity rises,
too. They [develop] a vocabulary to start composing with."
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.