The New Hampshire Boarding School That Made Creative Craft, Design, and Making the Center of Every Subject

There is a type of school that is hard to describe without seeing it. Not the kind of school that adds an art class on Friday afternoon as an afterthought. But one where making things with your hands is an important part of how students think about every other subject. There is a long history of academic rigor at boarding schools in New Hampshire. However, some schools in this area have been doing something more unusual: making craft, design, and the act of making itself central to how students learn.

We should take a moment to think about that because it goes against most modern education. Standardized tests are the main topic of conversation across the country. STEM pipelines get a lot of attention and money. Still, teachers and, surprisingly, employers are becoming more and more sure that students who know how to make something real, who’ve faced the challenges of raw material and found ways to work through them, are developing a way of thinking that spreadsheets and multiple-choice tests just don’t teach.

It’s not a new idea. Bedales School in Hampshire, England, opened in 1893 as the first boarding school for both boys and girls. It had strong ties to the Arts and Crafts movement. Its founders believed that arts, crafts, and drama should be an important part of every child’s education, not just extras. As part of their lessons, students planted trees, took care of animals, and worked outside. Since then, that feeling—that making and doing should be part of the school day and not outside of it—has affected how some independent schools on both sides of the Atlantic have set up their businesses.

New Hampshire is a good place for that spirit to grow. Independent and boarding schools in the area are adding more and more programs that include traditional schoolwork along with design thinking, craft-based subjects, and hands-on making. The point isn’t that woodworking is better than chemistry. Some students come to physics class in the afternoon with a different set of questions because they spent the morning figuring out how to build something out of wood. That might be a better question. One that is based on how things really work in the real world.

What this approach requires of school buildings is what makes it interesting, and sometimes controversial. The architects of Bedales’ Art and Design Building, which was finished in 2016, purposely went against the traditional school model of being closed off and full of hallways. Everyone had to go outside and walk along covered walkways that ran along both sides of the building. People made the walkways so that they could also be used as places to draw, paint, or just sit and enjoy the view. Woodworking, metalworking, jewelry making, and fashion design all have studios on the ground floor. Arts, crafts, and printing are done in studios on the first floor that get light from the north. There is no wall between making and thinking in the building. It won’t do it.

When you walk through these kinds of spaces, you get the sense that the architecture is making a point. That students learn best when they see proof that things can be repaired, changed, and imagined in new ways. In small but important ways, something similar has crept into the boarding school scene in New Hampshire. Craft and design schools in this area tend to share this belief: that a student who knows how to make something well—something that works, something that stays together, something that solves a problem—brings that confidence with them into every room they enter.

It’s still not clear if this model will catch on with more schools or if it will stay the domain of independent schools with the room and money to create dedicated studios and hire working artists as teachers. Some people are making a quiet but strong case, though. Not through press releases or conferences on education, but by making sure that students know how to think with their hands when they finish school. That’s not a little thing.