The Psychology of Apprenticeship: a Discussion Paper

The meritocratic cult of the “expert” arid the rise of “training” and the professional trainer have contributed to the discrediting of apprenticeship and its perception as an “unprofessional”, inefficient and irrelevant anachronism. This chapter calls for a positive revaluation of the role and possibilities of apprenticeship in educational and vocational development. The chapter traces the history and evolution of apprenticeship in England, from its origins in mediaeval craft guilds to the present day. A series of anecdotes from former apprentices illustrates some of the beneficial and potentially harmful aspects of the experience of apprenticeship in developing skills. If learning is an essentially social activity, the “apprentice” in education must not only make a body of knowledge his/her own, but must do so in a community which shares a sense of belonging to a culture. The idea of acculturation into a specific working life environment is, in fact, at the very heart of apprenticeship. Formal education is now an integral part of most apprenticeships, but no less important is the tacit knowledge immanent in an emotional engagement with the task in hand, allowing a crafts worker, for example, to operate creatively at one of the interfaces between conscious and subconscious thought. Finally, the chapter examines the persistence of male, youth-based apprenticeships, the issue of how to evaluate, economically and politically, the effectiveness of existing apprenticeship schemes, and the largely unexplored potential of these schemes in terms of both the communication of skills and their transfer from a specific context to new fields. Apprenticeship at its best, the article concludes, conforms with many current ideas about optimum conditions for effective learning and, unlike the current orientation of much UK “training”, may provide many key components for learning for the quality era.