Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 35 seconds

HI Scott,

Thanks for this interesting account from Alberta. It isn’t surprising that there is no walk after the talk. These are politicians and they are almost always myopic, seeing only as far as the next elections – so it it isn’t a short walk, then forget it. That’s why their “investment” in education is typically in buildings and equipment (smart boards, computers and so on). These are things you can by and give to people, take a picture with, cut a ribbon. After the photo-op, it’s business as usual.

Your experience teaching apprentices is very interesting. One of the salient issues of development in the Middle East (and possibly throughout the developing world) is “knowledge transfer”. I’ve been talking to a lot of industry and trade stakeholders here about this recently. The model – as best I understand it – is that there is a foreign expert who “transfers” their expertise to a local apprentice. This follows a traditional and asymmetrical model of teacher / learner. The bottle neck is with accreditation / certification of learning. Typically, this takes the form of a standardized instrument of some sort, often controlled by a third party agency in the West. The real role of the expert is to get the apprentice through the certification process successfully. Then, the credential is regarded as prima facie evidence of expertise.

This model breaks down at two points: 1) the foreign expert has little interest in working himself out of a job by “transferring” his expertise to a local; 2) credentialing is not evidence of other than a bare minimum level of competence – maybe not even that is the evaluation process is perfunctory or misaligned with objectives or teaching (this is the pedagogical piece you mentioned earlier).

Apprenticeship is a move toward a more collaborative model, less asymmetrical model. The objective of apprenticeship is not to achieve a credential but to integrate new people into a community of active professionals – a community that is usually also a learning community. Traditional, liberal arts education was clearly oriented toward this goal. However, over the past several decades, education has become more and more like training with it’s focus on narrow goals and minimum standards. To do this, we need to draw industry into the accreditation process.