The Praxis Program: Capability Through Hands-On Learning
There is a difference between knowing something and knowing what to do with it.
A student can understand the science behind a structure without ever building one. They can study leadership without having to guide a team through a difficult task. They can learn about entrepreneurship without ever trying to turn an idea into something another person values. They can read about traditional skills, communication, engineering, problem-solving, or community responsibility without ever having to put those ideas into practice.
The Praxis Program was created to close that gap.
The Praxis program is the process of turning knowledge into meaningful action. Across the Synchronicity family of programs, we have spent years creating hands-on experiences in practical skills, science, history, leadership, personal development, creativity, outdoor education, entrepreneurship, and more. The Praxis Program brings those areas together around a larger goal: helping people become increasingly capable.
Capability, as we use the word, means more than self-sufficiency. It includes confidence, judgment, adaptability, curiosity, communication, resilience, practical competence, and the ability to work effectively with other people. A capable person can learn something new, evaluate a problem, make a plan, adjust when that plan fails, and contribute to something larger than themselves.
That is the kind of learning the Praxis program is designed to encourage.
Four Ways to Learn by Doing
Praxis experiences are organized around four broad learning areas, or Labs.
SkillCraft Lab
SkillCraft Lab focuses on practical and traditional skills. Participants may work with tools, natural materials, historical technologies, outdoor skills, crafts, knots, cordage, navigation, writing technologies, shelter concepts, or other forms of hands-on knowledge. The subject changes, but the underlying lesson remains the same: use your hands, engage your mind, and become more capable through experience.
Discovery Lab
Discovery Lab explores STEAM—science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics—through investigation, experimentation, design, and problem-solving. Participants ask questions, test ideas, work with materials, evaluate results, and revise their thinking. Discovery Lab emphasizes the process of figuring things out rather than simply receiving the answer.
Success Lab
Success Lab turns toward the human side of capability. Depending on the group and age level, this may include communication, mindset, teamwork, leadership, relationships, entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, goal-setting, decision-making, or learning how to help other people succeed. These topics are usually approached through projects, scenarios, games, and active challenges rather than lectures.
Challenge Lab
Challenge Lab is where different forms of learning can come together. Participants may complete a team mission, solve a practical problem, build something, organize an event, carry out a field experience, develop a community project, or simply face a challenge that requires them to draw from multiple skills at once.
The Labs can stand alone, but they become especially powerful when they begin reinforcing one another.
A practical skill learned in SkillCraft might later become the subject of an engineering investigation in Discovery Lab. A Success Lab might develop the communication and leadership needed to organize a team. Challenge Lab can then provide a reason to use all of those abilities together.
A Developmental Pathway
The Praxis program is not intended to look exactly the same for every age.
A four-year-old and a fourteen-year-old may both benefit from exploration, independence, problem-solving, and meaningful responsibility, but the experience needs to meet them where they are developmentally. As the larger program grows, we are using distinct identities to help families recognize those stages.
Seekers — ages 4–7
Seekers are at the beginning of the journey.
At this age, learning is rooted heavily in play, sensory experience, movement, imagination, observation, and discovery. The goal is not to rush young children toward advanced skills. It is to encourage curiosity, appropriate independence, confidence, and a willingness to engage with the world around them.
Seekers may explore experiences from several parts of the Synchronicity family rather than belonging to one narrow subject area.
The Seekers program is in development and coming soon!
SkillCraft Explorers — ages 7–11
For ages 7–11, SkillCraft Explorers begin taking a more active role in hands-on learning.
Through Forgotten Skillz programming, Explorers work with practical skills, nature, materials, tools, traditional knowledge, creative problem-solving, and increasingly complex challenges. They are old enough to begin asking not only “What is this?” but “How does this work?” and “Can I do it myself?”
The emphasis remains exploratory. Success comes through trying, questioning, experimenting, making mistakes, and gradually developing both competence and confidence. They still experience all of the avenues of the four labs, but in an integrated way that is designed to be developmentally appropriate, while leading them toward the Pathfinders program as a natural progression.
Learn more about the SkillCraft Explorers:
Praxis: Pathfinders — ages 11–14
Pathfinders begin connecting different kinds of capability.
At this stage, practical skills can intersect more deliberately with science and engineering, leadership, communication, entrepreneurship, personal development, and larger team challenges. Participants are increasingly able to consider consequences, understand systems, evaluate competing solutions, and take meaningful responsibility within a group.
For Praxis: Pathfinders, the four Labs become an especially important part of the experience. Rather than treating science, practical skills, leadership, and problem-solving as separate subjects, students begin seeing how they support one another.
Learn more about the Praxis: Pathfinders
Praxis Program — ages 15 through adult
For older teens and adults, the Praxis program can become increasingly sophisticated, independent, and project-driven.
Participants may tackle deeper practical skills, complex STEAM challenges, entrepreneurship, leadership development, communication, community projects, workplace skills, or other areas where knowledge must eventually become action.
The same underlying principle remains: learn something useful, understand it, develop the human skills needed to apply it, and then put it to work.
The adult Praxis program is in development and coming soon!
A Natural Fit for Homeschool Learning
The first major expansion of the Praxis program is happening alongside Long Island’s homeschool community, and the fit has been remarkably natural.
Homeschool families often seek learning experiences that cross conventional subject boundaries. A single hands-on project might involve physics, history, communication, mathematics, design, environmental science, creativity, and teamwork without needing to stop and label each subject separately.
That is exactly how the Praxis program tends to work.
For families looking for homeschool enrichment on Long Island, Praxis can complement academic work with opportunities to use knowledge in different ways. Students can work with their hands, collaborate with peers, take healthy risks, spend time outdoors, experiment, create, lead, and solve problems that do not have a single answer printed at the back of a book.
The program can also adapt to the needs of individual homeschool groups. A group might host a single SkillCraft or Discovery Lab, complete a four-part Praxis cycle, or build an ongoing club that develops throughout the school year.
Homeschooling, however, is only one setting in which the model works.
Praxis can also be adapted for schools, libraries, camps, youth organizations, community groups, after-school clubs, municipal programs, and other organizations looking for experiential learning that goes beyond a traditional classroom format.
Where This Can Lead
One of the most exciting possibilities is allowing the different areas of Praxis to build toward something real.
Over time, a group might identify a need in its community, research possible solutions, learn the practical skills necessary to address it, test ideas through science and engineering, develop the communication and leadership needed to organize people, raise or manage resources, and ultimately create something useful.
The final product could be a build, an event, an educational resource, an improvement to a shared space, a service project, or something we have not imagined yet.
The finished project would matter, but the deeper accomplishment would be the people the students became while making it happen.
That is the idea at the heart of The Praxis Program: knowledge matters most when we learn how to use it—with our hands, our minds, and alongside other people—to solve problems, contribute meaningfully, and keep developing into more capable, thoughtful, confident versions of ourselves. Praxis is ultimately about turning what we know into action, and allowing that action to shape both the world around us and the people we are becoming.
Explore The Praxis Program
Ready to take the next step? Visit our Praxis Program overview to learn more about the full program, or explore the pathways currently available for SkillCraft Explorers (ages 7–11) and Praxis: Pathfinders (ages 11–14), where you can find upcoming sessions and registration options. If you represent a school, homeschool group, library, club, camp, or other organization and would like to bring Praxis to your community, visit our Host a Workshop page to start the conversation. Additional Praxis pathways are currently in development as the program continues to grow.
Keep Exploring with Forgotten Skillz
Interested in hands-on learning through nature, history, traditional skills, craft, stewardship, and human ingenuity? Follow Forgotten Skillz, explore our upcoming workshops and outings, and subscribe to the newsletter to keep the conversation going.
Michael A. Evans is the founder and lead educator of Forgotten Skillz and CEO of Synchronicity Coaching Inc., a multidisciplinary organization creating educational programs and experiential learning opportunities across Long Island and beyond.
Through Forgotten Skillz, Michael develops hands-on experiences that connect nature literacy, cultural history, traditional crafts, ancestral technologies, environmental stewardship, and practical outdoor skills. His programs invite participants to observe, question, experiment, make, and better understand how people across cultures and throughout history have interacted with the world around them.
Beyond Forgotten Skillz, Michael contributes to youth education as a creative collaborator on the Little Laurie Science Stories book series and the Ninja Née Science Education Program, helping create experiences that foster curiosity, creativity, scientific thinking, and a lasting enthusiasm for learning.
