What Cable and others struggle to explain is that a person who has spent time as an apprentice has something which is more than simply the sum of time spent in a classroom with time spent out ‘on the job.’  A successful apprenticeship means more than that.  Serving time with a real professional craftsman gives an apprentice something which the ancient Greeks called ‘gumption’ – an informed, shrewd, spirited resourcefulness.  To an apprentice gumption is critically important because in all things – be it the building of a ship, a company or a national constitution – the  ‘devil is always in the detail.’  If balked by a problem in one area, they back off, reassess the situation, and come at it from another way.  It is people with gumption that get things done.   England is in desperate need of people with gumption.

Recently, the English understanding of apprenticeship has been distorted in two ways.  Alan Sugar’s highly acclaimed TV show The Apprentice over-emphasised this as the skill of the entrepreneur, the key to financial success.  At the other extreme popular culture dismisses apprenticeship as a low-level form of training for plumbers, carpenters or electricians.  Both are simplistic.

In recent years cognitive scientists, synthesising neurobiological and biomedical research so as to understand just how the brain works, see in the processes involved in apprenticeship something which is extraordinarily ancient (‘ancient’ in the sense of a million or so years of genetically transmitted neural adaptations that create a predisposition to work/think in particular ways).  These processes are so well engrained in the structure of the brain, that scientists have coined the phrase “Cognitive Apprenticeship.”  Very simply, none of us learn something simply by being told to learn it.  We learn something because (a) we see somebody do something that we would like to do.  We are then helped to do this (b) when that person is able to break the task down into manageable subunits each of which we can take time to practice.  Such a sensitive mentor/teacher gives each of us temporary support (c) as we struggle to perfect the subtask.  Then as we start putting the bits together (d) the wise mentor slowly withdraws such external support leaving us to do more and more for ourselves.  Finally, (e) as with any apprenticeship, youngsters talk a lot as they pool their expertise.  Learning is essentially a shared, collaborative activity.

Vince Cable is right to stress the importance of apprenticeship.  The Coalition, if it is to achieve the radical transformation of English society for which it strides, has to realise that cognitive apprenticeship has a massive significance in almost all aspects of public life.  Mr Gove, for instance, has to put his energies behind pedagogic chance if he is to create children with a sense of spirited resourcefulness, and Mr Cameron has to remember that the best MPs are those who earlier earned their spurs, not in financial services, lobbying, marketing or television, but in the cut-and-thrust of local government.  Parliament is at its least effective when it is full of Members who have no personal experience of implementing its prescriptions at a local level for it is on the effectiveness of how individual councillors and members of society deal with the devilishly tricky detail that democracy depends.

In facing the challenges posed by cognitive apprenticeship the Coalition’s attempt to balance free-market principles with community responsibility and resourcefulness, it will face its greatest challenge in its attempt to build a more dynamic civil society.

Related posts:

1. Review: Master and Apprentice: Reuniting Thinking with Doing by John Abbott

Human behaviour fascinates us as much today as it did the philosophers of old.  Yet it is only recently that scientists have begun to unravel just why it is that we think as we do – and why that thinking can go badly wrong.  Drawing together the research from the bio-medical, cognitive and social sciences (something made possible within the past 20 years through functional MRI scans at one level, and theoretical studies in complexity and systems thinking at the other) it is becoming possible to detect the ‘grain’ to the individual human brain.

The structure of our brains today, rather like a cross section through the trunk of an ancient tree, are much conditioned by adaptations made in the distant past to changing environmental factors.  For example having been walking upright for some 2.5 million years human spines are still not quite adapted to being vertical (consequently we suffer from bad back problems), and we each still have an appendix though a shift in human diet a hundred thousand years or more ago should have made this organ redundant many generations back.

The survival of the human species depends on good thinking, rather than strong muscles.  It is on the ability of each new generation to learn as much as it can from its ancestors, and then to go on beyond the limitations of its parents’ thinking, that our species’ survival depends.  Just as dissecting the bone structure, muscles and nerve systems of a leopard’s legs explain why it is such a splendid hunter, so the new brain-imaging technologies make it possible to appreciate how humans have emerged to be the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.

Philosophers caught glimpses of this long ago: “I learnt most not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me,” reflected St Augustine 1,500 years ago acknowledging the interdependence of mental and emotional development.  A thousand years before that Confucius had said,

“Tell me, and I hear

Show me, and I understand

Let me do, and I learn.”

The medieval craft tradition in England required craftsmen to induct their young apprentices – be they lawyers, silversmiths, clerics or linen workers – into the ‘know-how’ of their craft.  This represented a structured progression (in a Confucian sense) from ‘telling’, to ‘showing’, then to ‘doing’ so that the apprentice could eventually demonstrate that Jack was now as good as his master.  Such apprenticeship was a mechanism by which youths could model themselves on socially approved adults and provided safe passage from childhood to adulthood in psychological, social and economic ways.”

Apprenticeship was an education for an intelligent way of life; it was a context-rich way of learning that integrated thinking and doing, theory and practice at every stage.  It was ‘hands-on’, and it was as much about the contribution that needed to be made to the common good as it was to the success of the individual.  Through constant interaction with practitioners, this enabled adolescents to learn how to become functional adults in home, community and the workplace, and do wisely and responsibly whatever it was that they would eventually have to do.  In contrast today’s classroom instruction involves an enormous amount of ‘telling’, a much smaller amount of ‘showing’, and in most instances very little ‘doing.’  In comparison to apprenticeship, classroom practices are essentially a cheap, but not very efficient, way of learning.

An Apprenticeship Model of Learning (AML) has now to apply the same principles, but in the context of modern communities.

AML is based on the understanding that, over vast periods of time, the guiding principle of our distant ancestors that empowered them to make enough good decisions to survive long enough to procreate which has, over countless generations, made us the planet’s pre-eminent learning species.  Over that vast period of time the ‘guiding principle’ of those distant ancestors (if evolutionary processes can accurately be described as such a term) has given young people the ability to select, out of a number of potential strategies, those which would be the most appropriate to solving particular tasks.  To do that children need to have learned a range of skills, and to have the ability to survey their future alternatives with a mixture of emotional and intellectual skills.

AML involves frontloading the system by providing generous resources to the youngest children so that their education can start a dynamic process whereby they are given such a mastery of a range of skills in their early years that they are progressively weaned of their de­pendence on teachers and institutions.

AML would seek to strengthen the role of the family and the community as the starting place for the apprenticeship model of learning so as to integrate young people fully into the life of a community so giving them the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with others as appropriate and using a range of resources and learning situations.

AML has to train teachers to so understand children’s instinctive needs that, like their col­leagues in Finland, they combine a fine subject knowledge with the wisdom to draw upon this as appropriate to take a child – as in apprenticeship – to the next level of understanding. While quality education is everything to do with teachers it is constrained by inappropriate structures of schooling.

In England that means ending the split between primary and secondary schools (and between two different ways of thinking about education); it means a revolution in teacher education, and a rebirth of the historic partnership on which a balanced edu­cation has to depend – on the interdependence of the home, the community and the school. Only when this is done will there be sufficient thoughtful, knowledgeable members of the community to restore the control of the educational process to democratically elected local representatives.

No related posts.

There is a new word being heard around the block – internship.  Traditionally it meant newly-qualified medical graduates understudying experienced doctors, but Alan Milburn’s Report, “Unleashing Aspirations,” expands the definition to mean young people shadowing experienced professionals so learning some of the tricks of their trade.  Internships are similar to apprenticeships.  However, as the media has been quick to point out, youngsters need parents with good connections if they are to find a quality internship which could well give them a hefty start on their career ladder.

William Pitt the Younger learnt the skill of premiership from his father, and Brunel learnt most of his engineering skills in his father’s workshop.  Alan Sugar has given an entrepreneurial edge to the meaning of apprenticeships, and this week’s Press has given an aura of social privilege to internships.  Both depend on the advice given by the Earl of Chesterfield to his son in 1746: “Do not imagine that the knowledge which I so much recommend to you, is confined to books, pleasing, useful and necessary as that knowledge is; the knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.”

Interest in apprenticeship and internship has increased as faith in the classroom has decreased.  This is bound to continue as the English finally accept that the separation of thinking from doing is as stupid as the separation of the academic from the vocational.

In the late 1920s my father attended a small West Country grammar school where every boy studying for Higher School Certificate (A Levels) had also to learn a craft skill.  My father studied under a Birmingham silversmith, and his eventual work was accepted by the Silversmith’s Guild to be assayed.  At university he decided against engineering, and became a priest.  Remaining an enthusiastic engineer at heart he and three colleagues completely rewired his vast Victorian church in the 1950s.  As a keen little boy I tried to help out by holding the trailing light to illuminate where the men were working, but my concentration frequently faltered, plunging the men into darkness.  Eventually this prompted my father to give me some of the best advice I’ve ever had: “if you don’t learn to think like I’m thinking you will never understand what I am trying to do, and you won’t know what you think you will need to do next!”

That was the advice he had learnt from the old silversmith, probably born in the 1850s; it’s what I have said to my own sons, and what I said to six-year-old Amelie last week.  That is what intergenerational learning is all about.

See Part Three of Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. A Journey Towards an Understanding of Learning: A Headteacher travels with Education 2000 to the 21st Century Learning Initiative
2. The messiness of human learning
3. Learning How to use the Brain