Apprenticeship
Before schools, craft knowledge passed through apprenticeship. The young learner joined a master’s workshop — observing, assisting, gradually taking on more complex tasks. Learning happened through participation rather than instruction. The master rarely explained; the apprentice watched and inferred.
Jean Lave’s Situated Learning (1991) called this “legitimate peripheral participation.” The newcomer does real work, but at the edges. The apprentice blacksmith starts by maintaining the fire, graduates to simple tasks, eventually forges complex pieces. Each stage involves genuine participation in the actual work.
The model transfers tacit knowledge that explicit instruction can’t capture. The apprentice sees how the master holds the tool, when they hesitate, what they look at. The thousand small adjustments that constitute skill get transmitted through proximity — language can’t carry them.
Medieval guilds formalized this structure. Seven years was typical. The apprentice lived in the master’s household, worked without wage, absorbed the trade. The system produced craftsmen who could reproduce quality without plans or specifications. The knowledge lived in hands.
Modern education inverted the relationship. Explicit knowledge first, application later. Learn theory in classrooms, practice in internships. But some domains resist this inversion. Surgery, glassblowing, fermentation — the tacit component dominates. You can read about riding a bicycle forever without learning to ride.
The apprenticeship model creates bottlenecks. Knowledge transfer is slow, one-to-one, limited by physical proximity. But it produces depth that broadcast education cannot. The apprentice inherits not just technique but judgment — when to deviate, when to persist, what “good enough” looks like.
The deepest learning still happens this way: research labs, writers’ rooms, startup founding teams. The explicit knowledge comes from books. The tacit knowledge comes from watching someone who already knows.
Go Deeper
Books
- Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger — The theoretical framework for how apprenticeship actually works.
- The Craftsman by Richard Sennett — Broader treatment of skill, craft, and the value of doing work well.
- Mastery by Robert Greene — Popular treatment of how masters across domains developed expertise.
- The Mind at Work by Mike Rose — Cognitive complexity in blue-collar jobs. Against the deskilling narrative.
Related: [[tacit-knowledge]], [[deliberate-practice]], [[shokunin]]