Teacher’s handicrafts buoy confidence within students

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. The suddenly have a vocabulary to start composing with."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.