Student Workshop

GROWING CONVICTION that American college boys ought to learn to use their hands as well as their heads has led the College to announce that a Student Workshop will be inaugurated next semester under the direction of a handicraft expert. President Hopkins, who feels that the "white collar" aspect of higher education has been over-emphasized to the disadvantage of the nation, has named Virgil Poling of Rochester, ter, N. Y., to direct this new phase of liberal arts education in Hanover and to provide instruction in wood working and other manual crafts.

Mr. Poling, who for the past eight years has been director of the fine arts department of the Harley Country Day School in Rochester, arrived in Hanover early in January to prepare the workshop, where power tools, hand tools and materials will be available to Dartmouth undergraduates interested in doing wood turning, cabinet work, wood carving, model making, metal work, and artistic work in leather, ceramics and plastics. Other forms of shop work will be incorporated into the program as the need for them develops. This new phase of liberal arts education at Dartmouth will be conducted entirely on a voluntary, noncredit basis.

Dean E. Gordon Bill, through whose office the student workshop plan has been developed, attributes real educational significance to the new program. "With the establishment of a Student Workshop under the direction of an expert 111 many handicrafts," he says, "Dartmouth has put herself on record as believing that one of the greatest weaknesses of present home, preparatory and college education is that boys have no chance to learn to work with their hands as did their ancestors who preceded the machine age." Dean Bill sees the workshop plan as important not only on the educational side but also on the side of "enlarged possibilities for enriching the future lives of students and insuring that enjoy-MRS, merit of their leisure hours throughout life will be greatly increased."

Dartmouth's undergraduate workshop will be located in Bissell Hall, former home of the Thayer School of Civil Engineering, where the Outing Club's hobby shop and the Hanover branch of The New Hampshire League of Arts and Crafts are already active. In assuming direction of this newest shop Mr. Poling will undertake an informal program similar to those already being directed here by Paul Sample, artist in residence, Dr. Richard Weaver, college naturalist, Ray Nash, director of the graphic arts workshop, and Ross McKenney, woodsman adviser of the Dartmouth Outing Club, all of whom are actively conducting various phases of the growing program of extra-curricular education which Dartmouth is sponsoring in the fields of art, natural history, graphic arts, and woods lore.

Mr. Poling, a graduate of Ohio State University in 1930, is a firm believer in the special value which manual work has in developing the social stability of the world. "I believe this so firmly," he says, "that I do not hesitate to say that the world would be a peaceful world if all the people in it could, and did, use their hands a great deal. I cannot imagine a world of Yankee farmers at war, and I believe this not because they are Yankees but because they have always mended their own barns, sheared their sheep, repaired their furniture, and hammered the iron shoes to fit the feet of their horses."