If we train our youth in the manual arts and encourage them to practice the skills necessary to make beautiful things by hand for the same reasons that we encourage our children to practice athletics or sports we might achieve the same successes in these fields of work as we have on these fields of play.
The success of our youth athletic programs is easy to see. On a daily basis, throughout our neighborhoods, at practices and competitions, there are children who are performing athletic feats of skill that are nothing less than beautiful to behold. Although such feats of skill are not easily achieved, they are not rare.
This is so because so many of our children are being encouraged to participate in sports for the right reasons. They are encouraged to learn the rules well and practice hard so that, when the opportunity arises, they will be able to make, a beautiful pitch, a beautiful shot, a beautiful move, or the perfect pass. Ultimately, they are taught to practice and play to the best of their ability so that they might give others something beautiful to look at. Our best coaches are those that have the ability to develop in our young players a love for making beautiful plays.
We hope to make these intentions clear by awarding our most accomplished athletes objects which are themselves beautiful to look at such as gold medals and crystalline trophies. Objects meant to symbolize that what the athletes have given us, whether as an individual or as a team, was what they endeavored to create for us, a masterpiece to see.
At the Northside Center for Architectural Assistance our youth manual arts and horticulture teams are led by coaching staffs and supported by families that have the same goals as the community’s youth football, gymnastics and basketball teams. They are committed to developing in each child who participates, a love for making beautiful work. They encourage practice and study so that each child will have the ability to contribute something beautiful to his or her built environment. And, eventually, just as with our athletic programs, our manual arts and horticultural programs will involve competitions held in our public spaces, so that our children’s work can be applauded, judged, scrutinized, talked about, recorded and formally recognized, by the bestowing of awards, as beautiful to look at.