Apprenticeship

At the last class before the Christmas break our woodwork teacher expressed his concern about falling standards at the school.

I strongly sympathize. He came into the profession the old way, about 25 years ago: as a 14 year-old youth under a strict teacher of the old school. The kept their tools sharp, their benches repaired and learned to do everything by hand before moving onto machines. This has gone: on the day courses a lot of pupils are there under protest – they have to train in order to qualify for unemployment benefit, and the results, which you see lying round the workshop, are not brilliant. The evening courses are really too short, with not enough workshop practice really to get a feel for wood and the machinery.

All this chimes into the second reason why I took the course and am still on it (70% attrition so far): it is the experience of ‘apprenticeship’ in the good sense: that of slowly learning a skill over a time from a master. And if you start at 14, like our teacher did, it is a whole structured reference framework which you grow up in. Cutting and planing wood accurately and getting furniture to fit snug produces an attitude towards life which goes well beyond the workshop, including in particular the spiritual life.