Ford himself wrote six books. That is where we shall find his ideas. I do not consider the machines which bear my name simply as machines. If that was all there was to it I would be doing something else. There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things.
Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer.
But it was not only mechanics that he was appealing to, or at least not people who thought of themselves as mechanics. Yet it is clear from the car itself and from the manuals that came with it that Ford expected its owners to maintain it and repair it themselves. It is also clear that he was aiming it at a farm population for whom the repair of mechanical devices was common knowledge. That is, as I say, an example of what what makes material culture an important ingredient in education, and that is what makes museums as essential to learning as are libraries. They need not be big museums, they need not house rare objects.