jimmysong on Nostr: The Case for Apprenticeships —————————————— The classroom ...

The Case for Apprenticeships
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The classroom setting is very unnatural. You sit there for an hour or two and just listen to someone talk while you dutifully take notes, or more likely, doom scroll your social media feed and maybe check your email. Learning by just sitting there and absorbing is against everything that we are as human beings. We are built for action. Moving our bodies around and imitating what others are doing is a much more natural way to learn.

The traditional way in which people learned was through apprenticeships. You went to train with another person that was an expert in their craft and you did what they did and learned through imitation. Instead of watching them for hours and then maybe practicing some of it at home right before an exam, you watched and did what they did with a much faster iterative loop. You got feedback and corrected and tried again.

The only thing that's like that in school today is with sports, where the movement of bodies and trial and error are unavoidable. They're also highly competitive with an objective metric of wins and losses, so they trend toward doing what works in practice rather than what should work in theory.

Theory versus Practice
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And indeed, that's what we're talking about, the difference between theory and practice. Lectures and classrooms are all theory. There's way too little practice.

This is why theory has such pitiful production. Social sciences are pretty much all theory. They're usually some twisted rationalization of some political goal. Since it's not based on truth and has very little in terms of objective competition, it tends to stray far into political power games.

We've been seeing this trend in academia where even hard sciences get deep into theory with very little practice. For example, string theory has been around for over 20 years and hasn't produced any results. Yet it continues to be popular, largely because of the investments PhD's made decades ago that are being bailed out by universities. That is to say, it's a giant circle jerk subsidized by political power games.

The real work has always been done on the ground, by people who are building. And to learn what they do isn't easily taught in classrooms, it's taught in factories and garages and labs.

Unscaling Education
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So why isn't apprenticeship more popular? The main reason is that it doesn't scale very well. Apprenticeship was mostly practiced within families where a parent would teach a child their trade. They had a natural incentive to make sure the child learned what they needed to as they shared a last name and would carry on a legacy.

To do that in a modern setting would be prohibitively expensive. There are way more people that want to get into certain trades than are spots available, so how do you choose them? We can see how restrictive this requirement is when looking at medical doctors. Part of why there are so few spots for doctors is the requirement of doing a residency, which is a form of apprenticeship. Medical schools typically have 5% or below acceptance rates, showing that there are way more people that want to be doctors than are doctors. In other words, apprenticeship is very hard to scale.

But nonetheless, I think it needs to be brought back, because we're losing a lot by not doing so. The best in a given field rarely pass on all of their tricks of the trade and sadly, they're re-learned through painful experience by others in the same trade. Diffusing that knowledge and experience is a way to not lose the progress we've made.