Low tech and high touch: Folk schools boom as people crave working with their hands
Low tech and high touch: Folk schools boom as people crave working with their hands
The North House Folk School in the tiny town of Grand Marais, Minnesota, along the rocky shore of Lake Superior, is busy with all kinds of classes this season.
In an old fish processing warehouse that’s been converted into a classroom, 15 students learned how to tan deer hides earlier this fall.
During the three-day class, students first scraped the hair off the skins. They softened the hides by soaking them in a mixture of pork brains and water.
Then they stretched the skins over a wooden frame and worked the fibers by leaning into the skin with hand tools. The final step was to smoke the hides to preserve the softness of the skins.
“It’s learning from others who have gone before and creating a team out of folks that don’t know each other at all,” said Ron Monson, a retired teacher from Minneapolis who’s taking his first class at North House.
“And it’s like so many things, it’s worth what you invest into it, right?” said Monson. “So whether I get a big hunk of hide out of this or not, my biggest value will be creating the opportunities for me to learn and creating new relationships and new friends.”
This hide tanning class is one of 350 courses that North House offers every year to about 3,000 students. Courses range from blacksmithing and basketry to boat building and fiber arts.
The concept comes from Scandinavian folk schools started in the 19th century that emphasized hands-on learning for skills to use your entire life.
“I think we knew right away that we had a tiger by the tail. Since we opened the doors to North House, the phone has not stopped ringing,” said Tom Healy, who co-founded the school in 1997.
Greg Wright, the school’s executive director, said since North House was founded 26 years ago, it’s grown every year but three: one year during the recession in 2008, and the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic
And if anything, the phone has been ringing more since the pandemic started. Wright said people increasingly want experiences working with their hands instead of staring at their screens.
“You know, the world is high tech, low touch. We’re the counterbalance to that: high touch, low tech,” Wright said. “Not that we don’t use technology or tools. It’s about connecting the past and the present and the future.”
There are now more than 60 folk schools around the country, including several that have opened elsewhere in Minnesota in the past decade.
The Duluth Folk School, a two-hour drive south of Grand Marais, offers classes that teach traditional crafts as well as skills for modern life.
“There was just a pitch writing class, like how to tell your story in 500 words, which is a life skill now, like ‘represent yourself on social!’” said Executive Director Sarah Erickson.
The school also offers classes in canning, how to make a drying rack and baking bread.
The folk school in Duluth is growing, and so is North House in Grand Marais. It’s even recruiting former students to help with an expansion.
The school is in the middle of a $5 million campaign to expand its campus and offer more space for students and instructors.
This fall, dozens of folk school alumni came back to help build a new welcome center. They used a traditional building method known as timber framing. It’s a process where they cut joints into huge white pine beams and then interlock them together like puzzle pieces — no screws required.
“People are immediately passionate about it. It’s just elegant and beautiful,” said Martha Williams, a retired yoga teacher who took one of the school’s very first timber framing classes 25 years ago. Now she helps teach classes at the school. “I do think that right now people are really craving making things that are real, making things with their hands.”
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