McClintock's Essay

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Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction

Robbie McClintock

Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000


 

Section 7 — Apprentice Schools
¶ 74
 		 I wonder if it would be possible to break down the unnatural separation that adolescents experience between the world of work and the world of study. As places of study, schools, especially the secondary schools, are vitiated by a pervasive unreality. The child's sphere of awareness is generally still quite circumscribed, centering on the home and locality: beyond that there is little difference between the world of make-believe and the world of distant actuality, for both must be conceived by an imagination that does not yet know the subtle difference between myth and abstraction. But with puberty, an awareness of the other, of complexity, of the world beyond one's immediate experience begins to dawn. Study schools might be designed to suit this curiosity.
 
¶ 75
 		 Historians of education still have much to learn about apprenticeship; for instance, we do not know how fully "vocational" the system really was. It may have been that many boys were apprenticed to a trade, not primarily to learn the trade, but simply to pay for their elementary studies. [ 64 ] Be that as it may, let us at least see that education through work, study while in close contact to the world of work, has many strictly educational, non-vocational values. Most important, it allows the young student to see the real human uses to which men put the ideas and skills that he is beginning to study. Is it possible to set up in the world of work a system of apprentice schools? This term, let us recognize, has its dangers, for apprentice schools are not "vocational" in that on the completion of their program students would have been stamped with a set of marketable skills. Rather, apprentice schools would place opportunities to study "academic" subjects in situations where the practical, worldly uses of those subjects could be directly experienced by curious students. 
 
¶ 76
 		 As a prelude to putting the case for the possibility of such schools, let us ponder briefly the subject of school finance. The state took over responsibility for providing education for "its" children primarily as a substitute for the family. The reasoning went that since most families could not afford to support their children in school, the state should do so for them. There was a certain misunderstanding, here, on the part of the legislating elites, for historically only upper-class families had had prime responsibility for educating their children. The responsibility for educating the children of the lower and middle classes had been largely corporate, not familial. Most children grew up as dependent participants in units that were more economic than conjugal. Because the educational responsibilities of economic groups were taken for granted, in sixteenth-century England when schooling began to displace apprenticeship in the larger cities, a number of the guilds quite naturally financed schools. [ 65 ] And this historical precedent also seems to be in accord with the natural order of things. All organized human enterprises derive great benefits from public provisions for education. All corporate organizations — labor, business, government, philanthropy — therefore have a concomitant responsibility to help house, finance, and staff those educational undertakings. Were this principle recognized, it would easily become possible to create apprentice schools within all these organizations.
 
¶ 77
 		 These schools would not be a means of teaching children a trade. By apprentice schools one does not have in mind a takeover of existing vocational training by interested industries. No; each corporate organization should be responsible for making room within itself for places of open secondary study, the function of which is to offer a full, round education, not special training. Moreover, the student should not be tied to a particular organization for all his secondary study; rather the apprentice school should be a roving school that offers its students the opportunity to experience the inner workings of all different kinds of adult activity as well as the opportunity throughout to study the basic cultural skills and ideas that pertain to the world he is experiencing. By achieving such a combination, the apprentice school would be like — only more general and on a broader scale — the executive training programs that many businesses run, in which the prospective manager spends six weeks or so in each department of the company, getting acquainted with its operations while studying the general principles of the business.
 
¶ 78
 		 A premise of the apprentice school would be a belief that adolescents could study the cultural core of secondary education somewhat on their own, without being housed regularly in a special school apart. We no longer need to confuse quiescence with continuity. A basis for sustained study can be provided for young men and women on the move in roving schools by developing special programs of studies that they would follow through closed-circuit television for half a day in places allotted to them by whatever organization they happened then to be observing. That cultural core might be specially designed, for instance, in a five year sequence, with years devoted respectively to the Earth, to Life and Health, to Industry, to Law and Government, to Art and Culture. While these study programs could be centrally produced and broadcast, local educational authorities would be responsible for handling the logistics of arranging opportunities for everyone in an age group to become involved in the day-by-day operations of the various local organizations that dealt with the earth and its uses, life and health, industry and labor, law and government, the arts and culture. Such a program would greatly burden the world of work and it would profoundly alter the pattern by which resources were mobilized for secondary education. But if it could be effectively organized, it could tremendously stimulate secondary school students; it would requisition resources for secondary education more in keeping with the distribution of benefits from that education; and it would greatly lessen the alienation from the adult society that the young learn from the present pedagogical absurdity of isolating them from adult realities. It might even humanize the practical world by reminding those caught up in it that there is more to life than adult obsessions.
 

 

 

 

Endnotes
Note 64 For suggestive remarks concerning nonvocational apprenticeship, see Ariès, op.cit., n. 31, pp. 365-69. [Back]
Note 65 For such foundations in sixteenth-century England, see Kenneth Charlton. Education in Renaissance England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, pp. 92-3. [Back]