How do I get started in woodworking?

It’s not so easy a question to answer these days because those who did at one time teach woodworking were once craftsmen who changed occupation to enter the teaching realm with their craft skills as working men. That changed when instead of teaching aspects of life to equip young people to engage in adulthood they began predicting trends to meet the demands of commerce and educated children accordingly. The predictive abilities of recent governments were obviously incompetent all around the world and so we end up with waste that left people ill equipped in any sort of practical realms. All that being the case, we can no longer look to educators to teach craft skills such as metal work and woodwork.

I’m not sorry that schools internationally have mostly dropped woodworking because they were pretty much not the best places to actually teach such crafts in any sort of real way. That said, it did touch the palate of kids to give them a taste of what it takes to work with wood, so it’s not all always a waste. I wouldn’t really lament the loss of woodworking in schools as such but I would lament the loss of skilled craftsman teachers for younger people in truly structured apprenticeships and environments where mature and responsible young people can go to to at least experience a two week programme of real work. Our goal is to make that happen for more and more young people without becoming exclusive and excluding anyone else.

So I’ve decided to take this on. Let’s see what happens from here. The ingredients you need to work with wood are not complicated, not sophisticated but need to be thoroughly explained.  I’ll give it some thought and we can get started.  We should start soon. How do you take the first steps in today’s age?