A few months ago, I was in charge of a station for a pack-wide cub scout meeting. When asked what I was going to do as my activity, I announced that we would be having a paper airplane building contest and I was hardly surprised by the eye rolls this plan received from the other den leaders. Tacky, they thought. For the little kids like her den.
It wound up being a huge hit, to the parents at least. I was in for a bit of a shock at how it was received by the children.
Do you know how few children can fold a paper airplane? I don’t mean a fancy airplane that does impressive loops or has a neat tail. I mean one that meets the basic concepts of being made from paper and having a central shaft with two wings.
Boys came through my station, grouped with their own age, though not sequentially, so I was left to work out my strategy each time we cycled them. Most of them had never once folded a paper airplane. As I explained the basic, necessary components that would enable the paper to be propelled through the air, many of the kids broke down crying, while I walked their parents through the few basic steps, beginning with “fold it down the middle.”
What surprised me most was that the oldest children were the ones least capable of managing to fold the paper. The youngest boys, who had only just started Kindergarten, were the ones most willing to try, with their efforts and confidence decreasing with age. I would have thought that the bigger boys were old pros at this.
It turns out, they were terrified, because they had never done it before. The youngest children were used to being asked to try something new; they faced learning new skills every day. The older the children got, the more comfortable they had become to never bother with something so basic, that being asked to give it a shot caused them to come unglued.
Some of the parents laughed and critiqued the children’s willingness, “I guess if you can’t do it through an app, you don’t learn how…” That spoke highly of their parenting techniques to me, so I kept fairly quiet.
How could there be fifth-grade boys who had never made a paper airplane, I wondered. I can hardly keep my boys from making them with their church bulletins and sending them flying across the sanctuary. Isn’t this something boys just did when simply coloring the paper wasn’t enough entertainment?
The next day, I was volunteering in my eldest son’s fourth grade class to make a papier-mâché project that was fairly basic, just covering balloons with the gluey wet paper strips. Some of the kids struggled with keeping their balloon steady, as it grew heavier to the sides already covered in material. But I had plenty of time to circle between students and chit-chat with other mom friends, including the art teacher, whose son graduated around the same time as me and knew me from my time in school. The same level of effort wasn’t required as my previous paper project.
I was still puzzled about the paper airplane activity. As I left the campus, one of the directors caught me in the hall and thanked me for volunteering my time and being willing to get my hands dirty. I laughed and told her how much I love helping with art, but shared the previous day’s events with her.
As we talked about it, she shared her insight into what has become a generational trend: we don’t know how to create anything with our hands anymore. My boys’ school is very hands-on with engaging activities, and strongly emphasizes the arts, but it is a rare type of institution.
But I realized she was right. This wasn’t just the children from the previous day who couldn’t fold the paper. I was instructing the parents as well. There were a few dads who got into the activity and were amusingly competitive, but as a whole, most had forgotten how to make this basic childhood object.
Everything we do is electronic, not just in business, but even in the creative world of art and music. Even as I write this post and think of the book I’m working to write, it isn’t being hand-written on paper the way my favorite honored writers of the past would have done. Setting aside the arguments about the negative effects of electronic time, I worry what else we are giving up when we willingly choose to avoid doing things with our hands.
If experience is the best teacher, yet we aren’t willing to experience, are we still learning? We still fill our time with activity even while our hands remain idle. At the end of it, can we still say we’ve learned, that we’ve felt, or that we’ve grown?
Parents, teachers, children, single adults, whoever is reading this, do yourself a favor today. Take some time to make something with your hands, even if it is as small and seemingly tacky as a folded airplane. You never know just what you might learn in the process, not just about the art media and the activity, but maybe you’ll discover something new in yourself as well.