This dissertation is a philosophical and textual study of woodshop class in American public schools from the 19th century to the present. It examines texts like curriculum, textbooks, manuals, newsletters, and newspaper articles, as well as interdisciplinary sources like anthropological studies of woodworking education, quantitative studies of shop class risk, design books, and more. These texts are analyzed in light of concepts relevant to the existential purpose of schooling, a philosophy of education that argues that the young should be welcomed and oriented to the world by the older generations, who can transmit the world to the young through subject matter. Woodworking in schools aids the existential purpose of education by fostering ethical practices and ways of being in the world, such as ecological thinking, care of things both organic and inorganic, pedagogies of devotion and repetition, skills for creating and maintaining things in the world, and embodied engagement with the material world. Further, this dissertation proposes that educational researchers consider the material specificity of the subject matter that they research, avoiding generalizing categories—such as craft—when it beneficial to target specific practices and materials—such as woodworking.