---
title: "Maker education"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_education"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:20:18.018902+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Though maker education has been embraced by thousands of schools and school districts across the United States and abroad, there has also emerged criticism of the movement.
Among the critics is Evgeny Morozov, a Belarusian writer and researcher, whose work focuses on the impact, both social and political, of technology. In his article published in The New Yorker, entitled, "Making It: Pick up a spot welder and join the revolution", Morozov criticizes Chris Anderson for "confusing the history of the Web with the history of capitalism and ends by speculating about the future of the maker movement, which, on closer examination, is actually speculation on the future of capitalism". He also criticizes companies and organizations that were once committed to open source software for becoming acquired by for-profit companies and embroiled in copyright and trademark lawsuits. Morozov also criticizes the maker movement's major contributors financial relationship with DARPA, which made a $10 million grant to support maker education for high school students, and $3.5 million to TechShop to establish new makerspaces.
While Morozov is one of the more vocal critics of maker education, he is not the only one. Debbie Chachra, associate professor at Olin College of Engineering, in her article in the January 23, 2015 issue of The Atlantic, entitled, "Why I Am Not a Maker", centers her criticism on "the social history of who makes things—and who doesn't". Chachra describes the history of the "makers" of products as men, rather than those who cared for "hearth and home", that is, historically, women. She calls for recognition of "the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn't about something you can put in a box and sell". In "A more lovingly made world", by McKenzie Wark of The New School, Wark writes that the problem with maker culture is that makers don't actually make things, they assemble them. While this experience is satisfying and fun (and Wark does acknowledge the way in which his children are not hemmed in by gender expectations while playing at the Maker Faire), it doesn't teach the underlying principles required for the actual making of functional objects. It also does not, though Chris Anderson and Mark Hatch evoke Marx in their Maker manifestos, map accurately onto an understanding of labor, and certainly not the life of the laborer.
Shirin Vossoughi and Paula K. Hooper of Northwestern University, and Meg Escude of Exploratorium, offer an in-depth look at the ways in which maker education reinforces educational inequality. They begin by offering Haitian writer, Edwidge Danticat's commentary on making: "If you can't afford clothes, but you can make them--make them. You have to work with what you have, especially if you don't 'have a lot of money. You use creativity, and you use imagination."
A Focus on Equity:  However, researchers, such as Calabrese Barton and Tan, have argued that youth make in ways that promote new just social futures. The object of making is not the artifact itself, but rather social justice. In their 4-year longitudinal study of youth makers they illustrated how making with and for the community opened opportunity for youth to project their communities' rich cultural knowledge and wisdom onto their  making while also troubling and negotiating the historicized injustices they experience.

== References ==

== Further reading ==