Muscles, Morals and Mind: Craft Apprenticeship and the Formation of Person

ABSTRACT: The paper considers apprenticeship as a model of education that both teaches technical skills and provides the grounding for personal formation. The research presented is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork with minaret builders in Yemen, mud masons in Mali and fine-woodwork trainees in London. These case studies of on-site learning and practice support an expanded notion of knowledge that exceeds propositional thinking and language and centrally includes the body and skilled performance. Crafts – like sport, dance and other skilled physical activities – are largely communicated, understood and negotiated between practitioners without words, and learning is achieved through observation, mimesis and repeated exercise. The need for an interdisciplinary study of communication and understanding from the body is therefore underlined, and the paper suggests a way forward drawing on linguistic theory and recent neurological findings. It is argued that the validation and promotion of skilled practice as ‘intelligent’ is necessary for raising the status and credibility of apprentice-style learning within our Western systems of education. A working apprenticeship can be a microcosm of almost every affirming principle of human life, a conservatory for the great existential struggle of our teens and twenties . ... Unfortunately, however, the standardisation of education in the West ... often fails to answer individual need. (Frank Wilson, 1998 WACQUANT, L. 2004. Body and Soul: Notes on an Apprentice Boxer, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar (neurologist and author))