The 'Problem' with Modern Apprenticeship

Kale at work on the “panel problem.”

I got to eat dinner with blacksmith Peter Ross last week while I was working in North Carolina. Peter has a particular interest in apprenticeships after training a bunch of them at Colonial Williamsburg (1980-2005) and listening to the stories of people who went through a traditional apprenticeship.

He asked a lot about Kale’s experience, then he offered his thoughts on modern apprenticeships. I couldn’t take notes, but I think this is a good summary of his comments.

For Peter, one of the big things that modern apprenticeships miss is emphasizing speed. While there is a level of quality that all shops must maintain to stay in business, the speed of the work is critical.

Why? Well in pre-industrial society a village might have a dozen blacksmiths who made the all the metal objects for the households and farms in and around the village. They all had basically the same equipment. In many cases, the prices they could charge were fixed by local authorities. And sometimes the people working in the blacksmith shop were paid via piecework and not on an hourly wage.

So you had to be fast.

Peter said this sort of quickness was difficult – and sometimes impossible – to imprint on apprentices at Williamsburg. Obviously, the apprentices there were on salary and weren’t paid for piecework (basically, a fixed amount of money per item produced, such as a hinge or hasp). So there was no imperative to become extremely fast at the anvil.

Aside from emphasizing speed, the other important part of the training Peter provided was requiring apprentices to master basic tasks before learning more advanced ones.

That is, instead of learning to make a lock from start to finish, apprentices had to first learn all the basic operations – over and over – until they were allowed to learn the next operation.

Put in woodworking terms, you had to learn to saw and plane boards straight and true before you learned any joinery.

I don’t disagree with Peter’s opinion or approach. In the newspaper trade, you had to master writing obituaries and briefs until you were allowed to produce byline pieces. And many newspapers, including the ones I worked at, kept count of your bylines. At The Greenville News, we had to write 300 byline pieces a year in order to qualify for a $25 raise in our weekly salary.

That system worked. But the world that Kale and I work in uses a different system.

The world doesn’t need any more chairs. In fact, if all the factories and chairmakers stopped making chairs for 10 years, I doubt the public would even notice.

We’re not competing on price. Because if we were, we’d lose. Speed is important, but there is something far more important: making something that other people desire and will pay for that they can’t get anywhere else.

That, in a single clause, is what I do as a chairmaker. You can’t find stick chairs at stores. There aren’t a lot of professionals who make them. And they are appealing enough that people buy them from us.