I nside one sprawling warehouse in West Oakland, California is a cacophony of heat and sound. There is the roar of furnaces, the clanging of metal on metal, the crackle of sparks. Jimi Hendrix plays in a distant corner. Leather-clad workers roam around the space, wielding fire, metal, and glass.
But these Hendrix fans are not grizzled motor heads at work. They’re kids. Highly confident, capable kids. TZM Rod Ground Finish
What once was an old paper tube factory is now the Crucible, the largest nonprofit industrial arts education facility in the United States. Founded by artist and teacher Michael Sturtz in 1999 — with a grant of just $1,750 — the goal was to reinvent arts education by democratizing the skills and materials traditionally reserved for experienced craftsmen. Since then, the Crucible has grown rapidly, with 90 faculty members now serving over 8,000 students every year.
Ismael Plasencia, who works with the youth program, is the unofficial tour guide for the facility. He wears a flat brimmed Golden State Warriors hat and sports a thick beard. Everyone calls him Iz. “In simplest terms,” he said, “a crucible is a container, like this one here, that holds hot liquid metal.” He held up a small, well-used ceramic urn as he spoke.
“But it’s not just that,” he added. “[The Crucible] is also a place where different parts interact to produce something new. There’s obviously a lot of hot metal in our building, but it’s also a place where students come to learn and transform. Nobody is the same when they leave this place.”
Students at the Crucible learn functional skills like welding, blacksmithing, blowing glass, turning wood, and working leather. But there may also be some outsize benefits to the organization’s “maker”-inspired curriculum.
“Holding a torch, being able to light that torch, and cut metal,” said Carla Hall, who directs youth programs, “there is incredible growth that happens. In our space, on the making path, [students] learn life skills; confidence, creative problem solving, tactile learning.”
“There’s great joy in trying something that you have absolutely no idea if it will work,” said Sudhu Tewari, who leads Crucible’s bike building programs, among its most popular offerings. “Hands-on learning really reaches some people in ways that textbook learning can’t, ever.” Tewari is an industrial artist and a champion of what he calls barnyard engineering. It’s part science, part art, and a whole lot of experimentation.
“Let’s say your brakes don’t work,” he said. “What do you do? You look at something similar and you make your thing look like that. Just experiment. Try something. If it makes it worse, try something else. If it makes it better, keep doing more of that until your thing is awesome.”
Gabriel is one of many students at the Crucible who ascribes to Tewari’s philosophy of making awesome things. He is energetic, a fast talker, and gives the impression of almost being too smart for his own good. He’s 10, and despite being adorable (or more likely because of it), he hates being called cute.
“Making stuff, like masks, robots, and cars,” is Gabriel’s favorite thing about the Crucible. “But then testing stuff. I like the testing stuff better.”
What happens when a test goes awry? Gabriel’s face contorted in a way that said the answer was almost too obvious to state. “Duh, you fix it,” he said. “Or if you don’t have enough time, leave it. And you’re like um, whatever, there’s always next year. I fail almost all the time.”
“You have to suck for awhile,” said Tewari. “When you learn to do something, you have to be terrible at it. That’s just how it is. It’s a great equalizer.” Traditional classrooms, he and other staff members said, rarely allow students the freedom to fail hard and often.
17-year-old Kobe has braces and a touch of ‘fro. He recently became a Fuego Intern — the Crucible equivalent of a teaching assistant.
“Being here is a unique opportunity,” he said. “I have to value my time here, to actually make the most out of every moment. Unlike school, you know, which feels more like a time drain. You have to be there working towards credit, classes, prerequisites, and what not.”
In contrast, at the Crucible, Kobe drives his own progress. He has dabbled in most of the organization’s offerings, but TIG (tungsten inert gas) welding is his favorite. “It is really precise, and really clean,” Kobe said. “And those are things that I value. It’s pretty hard, so there’s always room to improve.”
Over the last couple weeks, he has been hard at work on his crowning achievement to date. He describes it as “kind of a mecha, Godzilla thing” (to the uninitiated, it looks like a metal robot lizard).
“I thought of an idea for the body,” he said, with the passion of a wild inventor. “I did the legs, something it can stand on. It just came part by part. These things that I had for the fingers, they were just the byproduct of cutting up the pieces for another part. I noticed they looked like claws, so I just went with it.”
Students are provided with an endless bunch of scrap parts, odds and ends, sheet metal, perforated steel. They are expected to find creative and functional uses for almost everything they are given — to reduce, reuse, and recycle in real time.
“They come up with the wildest, craziest ideas out of this random stuff we give them,” said Tewari. “They’re not bound the same way that adults are bound by the inhibitions of ‘Oh I don’t know how this is going to work,’ or ‘I don’t know how to do that.’”
To Kobe, this process has become second nature. “The first idea always leaves a lot of things open,” he said. “And then I just go from there.”
Despite the overt differences between building robot lizards and studying Shakespearean literature, there may be links between the workshop and the classroom. “There are really specific ties with science, around chemistry and physics in particular,” said Hall. “Math, as well. And art. Obviously art.”
Elaina is 16 and has a few streaks of purple hair. She’s currently arc welding a cat, using a process similar to Kobe’s — lots of scrap metal and an inventive openness.
For her, the maker education she receives at the Crucible isn’t just about creative freedom. “I want to be a biomedical engineer,” she said with a glowing certainty. “I want to solve scientific problems, so I can make vaccines, prosthetic legs, incubators for newborns. Who wouldn’t want to help so many people at once?”
Her work at the Crucible, she explained, is a vital piece of her education. “There’s so much science in what we’re doing here,” she said. “You do arc welding, but you also do oxyacetylene torch cutting. So I learn about oxyacetylene in school, I learn the science behind it in chemistry, but then I come here and I actually do it.”
E Even social studies teachers, like Bobby Glasser, have found value in the Crucible’s approach. When his sixth grade students at Orinda Intermediate School learn about ancient civilizations, he takes them to the workshop to have, in his words, “the ultimate field trip.”
“All the ancient civilizations had the technology the Crucible works with,” he said. “Instead of just reading about this stuff, we went in there, and the connections were immediate. Pictures and words do not do these things justice.”
Glasser acknowledged that it’s nearly impossible to replicate the Crucible experience in the traditional classroom — and that for many teachers, such a field trip would be logistically impossible. In those cases, there may be alternatives. “There are students doing amazing stuff with video and technology,” he said. “And that’s hugely important. I love what students can do with a computer and a 3D printer.”
Whether online or in person, though, he thinks that most students would benefit from a maker experience. “When you’re making something,” Glasser said, “There is no wrong answer. Schools are limiting when they teach you that there is only one way to do something. The skills of making and working together, of creating, they all need to be a part of education.”
In a warehouse full of hot metal, sharp tools, and heavy machinery, safety and respect for the space and one another are paramount.
But it’s not just about physical safety and respect for the dangers of the work. It’s about emotional safety. “You have all these students from different places, different classes, races, ethnicities, and ages,” Hall said, “but they’re all making art, they have that common thread of process. They’re working in diverse, collaborative environments; the team building, the conflict resolution is so important.”
Students are also taught to respect the materials they are given. In fashioning art and machines out of discarded scrap, they learn how to make what they want out of what they’ve got. And in a world that is ever-changing, in which resources will become ever scarcer, this is the most essential lesson that anyone can learn. This is what it is to be an innovator.
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