Apprenticeship is generally for the so-called servile arts. The article completely neglects medieval education in the form of the liberal arts, and specifically the trivium and quadrivium. These are experiencing a minor resurgence in various forms in classical education curricula.
wrp 8 hours ago [-]
TFA misses a key difference between apprenticeship and classroom learning. Apprentice training tends to be one-on-one. When classroom instruction is done one-on-one, learning dramatically improves. This is called the "two sigma problem" in the educational literature. Ignoring this aspect gives the other factors discussed in TFA exaggerated significance.
throw10920 7 hours ago [-]
Practice is extremely important, and I don't think its importance is exaggerated at all.
I would expect students in an environment with a typically high student-to-teacher ratio, but who actually practice what they're being taught, will significantly outperform students who are taught one-on-one by a personal tutor but rarely actually perform the thing that they're trying to learn.
Obviously, "¿Por Qué No Los Dos?" - doing both is even better. But tutoring isn't obviously superior to practice.
As a personal anecdote (not to replace the above general arguments), I've gotten several hundred hours of one-on-one tutoring in an advanced field of physics from a number of experts, and yet I learned significantly less than I have from significantly fewer hours studying a separate (but no less difficult) field of math when I actually worked the problems.
jonahx 6 hours ago [-]
> But tutoring isn't obviously superior to practice.
Good tutoring will essentially be practice and worked problems with instant feedback -- not an individual "lecture".
While there is value to being in the forest entirely alone, I think for a motivated student good tutoring will outperform working problems on your own in speed of overall learning. Both are good though, and I agree working the problems out, and working a lot of problems, is the main thing.
seer 33 minutes ago [-]
Practicing and getting constant feedback is so important (and sadly underrated in school). It still strange to me how we empathise rote learning in school and have the experimentation away from experts (homework).
For example in orbital mechanics it was experimentation that got me to actually understand all the retrograde burns, plane changes and Hohmann transfers, almost exactly like the xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/1356/ (though without the job at NASA part of course)
atoav 35 minutes ago [-]
As a university level educator that also has assistants that learn through practise I must say I find the question: "Is tutoring better than practise?" useless. Better at what? In which field?Thst surely highly depends at what the goal, the subject, the individual students character, the available time and teaching resources are.
That means the question is so context-dependent that any potential answer would only bring insight with that specific context in mind.
That being said, I am a huge fan of practise paired with theory (this is what a good tutor would do). Many people only start to care about theory once they have encountered the problems theory helps with have been encountered in the wild. And getting people to care is one of the first things any educator has to achieve.
There are many who start with the base assumption that theory is worthless, but I'd argue having accurate mental models will greatly improve the speed and quality of the work. Additionally this helps to learn faster, as the question why aomething went wrong in practise can be answered faster and more accurately.
efitz 1 hours ago [-]
1:1 classroom instruction removes a number of teachers from the labor pool equal to the number of students. Apprenticeships remove only a small fraction of that from the labor pool (because the practitioner spends only part of their time teaching/supervising the apprentice and then makes the apprentice go practice the skill) and partially makes up the lost labor with the labor from the apprentices- apprentices are expected to do actual productive work, not just learn.
impossiblefork 26 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't have to be a crisis time-wise.
In music you usually have a small amount of one-on-one instruction and then you practice. In tennis you usually have a small number of one-one-lessons and then you practice and play matches.
You could probably do the same for maths. You're given some problems to try to solve and given two hours, then once you've made a serious attempt you get individual tutoring for an hour, then you go back to solving problems and there's a short one-on-one question session at the end, let's say 30 minutes. Then you have a 5 hour study session with 1.5 hours of teacher time, so he can have around three students.
somenameforme 4 hours ago [-]
This is extremely interesting, because while I'd never heard of the '2 sigma problem' [1] before, one university class I had seems to have been largely modeled on it, but with a very different angle. It was a 'self paced' electrical engineering course where we were given a textbook and free to advance through it at our own pace - kind of farcically, since you needed to complete at least 2 chapters per week to finish by the end of the semester.
Moving forward to the next chapter required, exactly as described in that paper, the completion of a problem set and then a score of at least 90% on a test demonstrating mastery of the previous chapter, sometimes accompanied by also demonstrating that skill in a lab. But far from 1 on 1, this entire class was effectively 0 on infinity. The teaching assistant/proctors that we engaged with were there only to grade your work and provided minimal feedback.
And indeed it was one of the most educational 'classes' I ever took. But I think this challenges the concept that it has anything to do with 1 on 1 attention. But rather the outcome seems practically tautological - a good way to get people to perform to the point of mastery is to require that they perform to the point of mastery. Of course, at scale, all you're really doing is weeding out the people that are unable to achieve mastery. And indeed that class was considered a weed out course.
Mastery Learning, which Bloom advocates for in the two sigma problem paper, is an alternative to 1 on 1, not a way to achieve it.
What you describe seems to be a very poor implementation of mastery learning. But if the tutor is completely disengaged even 1 on 1 tutoring is unlikely to have good effects.
PunchTornado 34 minutes ago [-]
maybe with AI and things like guided learning from gemini we all can get a 1-1 instructor.
musicale 6 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, the (medieval?) tutorial system is still used at some universities, notably Oxford and Cambridge.
Much of graduate education in the US seems similar.
RataNova 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, while the article makes good arguments about learning by doing and context-rich environments, it probably understates how much of the effectiveness comes down to just personalized guidance
danielbln 3 hours ago [-]
If it wasn't for all the pitfalls and hallucinations (and even then there is probably something to be had already) LLMs would be perfect for this. Limitless customizable one-on-one tutoring. I would have killed for something like it when I was in school, instead the choices were expensive tutor (not an option) or else good luck, hope you pay attention in the back of the 30 student classroom.
WalterBright 6 hours ago [-]
I learned in college that I didn't learn anything until I worked the problem sets.
(It always seemed like I learned it, but when faced with the problem sets I discovered I hadn't learned anything yet.)
It's the same with everything. You can watch a yootoob video on rebuilding a carburetor all day, but you don't know nuttin until you take it apart yourself.
I decided to learn to ride a dirtbike. I took some personal instruction from an expert, and promptly crashed. Again and again and again. Finally, my body figured out how to coordinate the controls.
Can't learn how to double clutch downshift from watching a video, either.
WalterBright 6 hours ago [-]
I drive a stick car. Shifting gears happens smoothly without any conscious thought. Not with the dirtbike.
Every time, I have to stop and think through it step by step. My recent rides have all been constantly up and down shifting, in order to get it properly into muscle memory. I was annoyed that my car shifting skills did not transfer.
Teaching is hard and training courses are often terrible. IMO, lessons need to consist of multiple (usually hierarchical) examples of (1) specific thing to learn, (2) high level motivation for doing this thing, (3) specifically when to do the thing, (4) specific causes and effects between your actions and observations during the process.
I did a snowboarding course once, and it was largely useless because they didn’t actually explain any of the mechanics of how the board actually worked beyond seesawing mostly-sideways down the ultra beginner slope. It wasn’t until I had a chance to experiment that I started actually figuring out anything useful.
I absolutely taught myself how to double-clutch from YouTube and Initial D, though. :D (Plus copious practice, of course.)
WalterBright 3 hours ago [-]
I taught myself how to ride a bicycle, but was baffled for a long time how the bike stayed up. I did some very careful observation of what my body was doing to make it work, and finally figured it out. I've had some difficulty transferring that skill to the dirtbike, and spend a fair amount of practice time just doing figure eights.
Another weird thing. I've been using the same text editor for 40 years. I no longer remember what the commands are - but I can still edit files just fine. Sometimes I watch my fingers to see what the command actually is.
quibono 2 hours ago [-]
> I no longer remember what the commands are - but I can still edit files just fine. Sometimes I watch my fingers to see what the command actually is.
I learned how to solve the Rubik cube some years ago and I found the same thing. I instinctively know the sequence of steps but I would find it very hard to actually write it down.
bluenose69 1 hours ago [-]
The author is a good writer, able to expand upon (and illustrate) ideas articulately and convincingly. However, quite a lot of this doesn't quite apply to actual practice in education, particularly in science.
High-school and undergraduate science classes tend to pair lectures with labs. Practical work is very much the focus of those labs, and the lab instructors work closely with students who need help. And a postgraduate degree typically involves a student working side-by-side with a professor on practical work.
As for the pyramid model, I think the author makes some good points, especially for the grade-school level. However, it's simply a fact that being comfortable with adding comes in handy before moving on to multiplying.
Good teachers find ways to motivate students, and adjust those ways as the years flow by. They know how to do their job, and I trust them to find the best practices.
One thing I've heard from many teachers, especially those who are notably effective, is that teaching theorists are not of much help. And I see that in the silly trends that higher-ups impose on teachers. That way of teaching multiplication that has worked for generations? No good -- we must scrap it. The practice of teaching students to write cursive? So quaint - time to toss that in the trash bin. Years later, I see the results of these trends, when students come to university.
The problem of teaching theorists coming up with silly ideas is a result, I fear, of the system of educating educators. How do you get a PhD in a subject? You have to come up with a new idea. Nobody got an advanced graduate degree in education by writing a thesis that said "teaching is fine as it is." No, that PhD student has to say "this is broken, and here's how to fix it." But some things just aren't quite broken, not really. Sure, some adjustments might be helpful. More one-on-one tutoring would be great. Although then, the non-theorist immediately sees a problem: we don't have enough teachers, as it is.
beloch 6 hours ago [-]
Medieval craftsmen often ran what we would consider to be sweatshops, with many young (i.e. child) apprentices banging out work and not receiving much instruction in exchange. We're romanticizing and idealizing a past that was, in realty, often quite exploitative.
There are reasons why we started sending children to schools rather than businesses for basic education. There is also little need to reach back to medieval times when comparatively less exploitative (but still imperfect) apprenticeship systems are alive and well in the trades today.
One-on-one practical instruction related specifically to what you want to do is awesome, but there are a lot of difficulties in incentivizing people to supply such instruction.
1718627440 3 hours ago [-]
Even manufacturing without instructions gives you practice. Also you need only so much instructions per practice, getting instructions won't actually help you get better you also need to do it.
The master very much cares about your quality, because if it doesn't look like his quality nobody will buy it. If the quality goes down to much, there will be complaints to the guilt and he looses its ability to do business.
If you have problems with your master you can look for another one. The good always needed to reject prentices, the bad had nobody showing up. In-fact you were required to stay with multiple masters.
If you complain about them not having an 8-hour day, nobody had that in the middle ages. But tradesman were more of the richer people in a city, maybe behind tradesman.
watwut 29 minutes ago [-]
In medieval setup, no you could not just look for another master. That is not how the society functioned. There was hierarchy and you had your place in it - bottom.
Also, apprentices duties involved also general housework and pretty much any random thing they told you to do. They would beat you if they thought you do not do what they want and you would be serving literally whole day and that was it. And no it was not whole day of learning. Based on book I read, that frequently involved things wife of the master ordered - they had nothing to do with the trade and that was normal.
With eating, you would wait behind the master while their lunch and tend eat whatever remained.
RataNova 3 hours ago [-]
The romanticism around apprenticeships misses how tricky it is to scale personalized, practical instruction without either underpaying the instructor or pricing out the learner
obscurette 5 hours ago [-]
It's not that bad in theory, but it's true that modern "no homework!", "no boring practice!" etc directions have done a lot of damage during last decades. But it answers quite well to common complaints why we are still learn to solve quadratic function in school although almost nobody uses it later in their lives? It's because quadratic function is a simplest way to lay a foundation to understand a tons of broad theoretical concepts about functions – turning points, zeros, decreasing, increasing, symmetry etc.
somenameforme 5 hours ago [-]
I'd generalize this even further. Math, especially higher level math, often turns into a sort of puzzle. And solving quadratic equations is the first step going from learning how to execute basic arithmetic to using it in the process of solving a puzzle.
The fact that these puzzles can then be used to do cool things is almost just a fortunate coincidence.
paulgerhardt 8 hours ago [-]
I would wager the benefits of this model come mostly from the 2 sigma boost one gets from one on one instruction and not from any sort of optimal skill tree progression a master would impart on a student in a pedagogical environment engineered for optimal knowledge and skill acquisition.
zdragnar 7 hours ago [-]
> a pedagogical environment engineered for optimal knowledge and skill acquisition
I'm not sure how many of those we have available to us. Many are compromised by politics, funding, or the need to act as a daycare.
I learned a lot at the various schools I went to, but the amount I learned seemed to correlate more directly with how invested I was in learning than how well the school was funded. Plenty of schools with better per-pupil funding had significantly worse student achievement rates than where I was.
The only real exception to that is not all schools offer the same curriculum. Back in my day, not every secondary / high school had someone who could teach calculus, though now there's districts that are getting rid of calculus entirely to promote anti-racism. Honestly, I think learning calculus in high school was good for me, even if I've really only needed to calculate integrals once in my programming career.
At University, things were much the same. Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
All of this is to say that I'm not really sure it's fair to knock the apprentice program since we don't directly experience optimal pedagogy elsewhere.
WalterBright 6 hours ago [-]
> Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
Sorry about that. At Caltech, we were never given formulas. Everything was derived from scratch. I never memorized anything (but I found after a while I simply knew all the trig identifies!).
chmod775 8 hours ago [-]
Apprenticeship is alive and well across Europe, most famously probably in Germany. The majority of young adults there completes one.
> The majority of young adults there completes one.
Are you sure about this? Your quoted article only has data from >20 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if nowadays more people study at university than do an apprenticeship
maverwa 39 minutes ago [-]
Combining both is also pretty common in my experience. People frist do an apprenticeship, then, for example because their employment situation changed, they go to university.
There are ways for a apprenticeship to qualifiy one to go for university.
In 2024, according to the "Bundesinstituts für Berufsbildung" 486,700 people started their apprenticeship [0]. In the same period (2024-2025) 490,304 people started their first semester at university/college, according to the "Statistisches Bundesamt" [1].
So you are right, theres more new students than apprentices, but its not by a lot.
Based on my experience and not hard data: Not most, but still quite a few.
Some jobs more or less require an apprenticeship (carpenter and other handy jobs). Doing an apprenticeship for a job and afterwards going to university also happens a lot
chriseidhof 1 hours ago [-]
This really speaks to me.
I teach SwiftUI to people. I've written books and teach classes. The books don't work nearly as well (because many people just read it instead of actually practicing SwiftUI). The classes I teach ("workshops") are extremely hands on, I try to defer my explanations to after the exercise as much as possible. The feedback is often very positive, and I can tell afterwards that people have really grasped stuff. I know I'm just trying to confirm my biases here as well, but to me, there's nothing better than doing stuff first and then analyzing it.
ahartmetz 1 hours ago [-]
I think I'd prefer overview, exercise, details. You need some kind of mental framework. I guess you don't just dive right in, otherwise you wouldn't be getting good feedback ;)
What I really hate is explaining the solution before explaining the problem. It's a terrible way to teach and it's quite common. I like to say that there are two bad ways to teach: The cookbook (do this, then do that) and the maths textbook (solutions without problems or context). The good way is a combination of them with some additional things that neither of them has, like motivating examples, relevant anecdotes etc.
bradley13 2 hours ago [-]
Much of Europe still has apprenticeship programs for the trades. The loss of this in the US and the UK shows in the quality of work: anyone can claim to be a carpenter, or painter, or whatever: whether or not they have any training.
syphia 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if concerete seeing/doing is the only, or even most effective, way to learn.
I've often learned by recalling the concepts from a lecture, reasoning about the material, and imagining what some of the problems would look like while sketching out solutions in my head. It's not any easier than doing the homework, but it is more convenient and flexible. And it can sometimes help with physical skills.
Theory is still important because it communicates how other people understand what they do. But it's certainly not a replacement for reasoning and experience.
I've found the best model of learning is to... not have a "learning process" in the first place. I try to understand as much as possible from as many angles as possible. This means big concepts, minutae, my ideas, other people's philosophies, imagined scenarios, hands-on-experiences, tangentially related concepts, and so on. Being able to answer questions or do the task is more of a side-effect than the intent.
dwd 5 hours ago [-]
Fortunately this model is still partially used for some careers like medicine and veterinary practices where you have a mandatory internship of at least a year before you can be admitted as a practicing GP or Vet.
HPsquared 2 hours ago [-]
And pilots. Lots of "hours" required for the different grades.
Zobat 2 hours ago [-]
> Human beings, it appears, are nearly unique in the animal world for being able to learn something by watching somebody else do it.
This is just blatantly wrong. If nothing else I myself have shown dogs how to solve problems, but here's a link to Wikipedia for good measure.
Honestly, it's not worth your time, a lot of presumptions, false premises and incomplete hypothesis. Also, apprenticeship didn't disappear, it's still very much in use in many countries. The focus is just different. Classroom education allows a plethora of secondary skills to be trained without the pressure of performance. For some, it's essential.
megamix 6 hours ago [-]
Wish I practiced programming more than just trying to understand the perfect way to code or theories behind. Such a waste of time :(
attila-lendvai 4 hours ago [-]
compulsory education is a main pillar of the twisted power structure in our society.
power in society comes from a knowledge gap, and powerful people have all the incentives to sustain it. consequently education is a battleground, and we, the honest people, have pretty much lost the battles for about a century now.
the OP only makes sense when also considering this aspect of the question.
RataNova 3 hours ago [-]
School teaches you about things; apprenticeships teach you to do things. Huge difference.
KineticLensman 2 hours ago [-]
That’s essentially the difference between education and training
booleandilemma 8 hours ago [-]
It's just an ad for a series of self-help books.
bravesoul2 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I want a self help apprenticeship
gattilorenz 5 hours ago [-]
I find it telling that right in the first paragraph it says “People in the middle ages lit cats on fire for fun” as a fact, while it is, in the most charitable interpretation, something historians disagree on (and in the least charitable interpretation, it smells like bullshit from a mile).
I certainly am skeptical of someone taking Wikipedia as the Truth.
alhazraed 8 hours ago [-]
Don't look down on Scott Young - he has written about interesting things and in my opinion is a great author. Don't knock him until you have read some of his work.
For example he wrote this: "How Do We Learn Complex Skills? Understanding ACT-R Theory"[0] (ACT-R[1] is written in Common Lisp for HN people).
I would expect students in an environment with a typically high student-to-teacher ratio, but who actually practice what they're being taught, will significantly outperform students who are taught one-on-one by a personal tutor but rarely actually perform the thing that they're trying to learn.
Obviously, "¿Por Qué No Los Dos?" - doing both is even better. But tutoring isn't obviously superior to practice.
As a personal anecdote (not to replace the above general arguments), I've gotten several hundred hours of one-on-one tutoring in an advanced field of physics from a number of experts, and yet I learned significantly less than I have from significantly fewer hours studying a separate (but no less difficult) field of math when I actually worked the problems.
Good tutoring will essentially be practice and worked problems with instant feedback -- not an individual "lecture".
While there is value to being in the forest entirely alone, I think for a motivated student good tutoring will outperform working problems on your own in speed of overall learning. Both are good though, and I agree working the problems out, and working a lot of problems, is the main thing.
For example in orbital mechanics it was experimentation that got me to actually understand all the retrograde burns, plane changes and Hohmann transfers, almost exactly like the xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/1356/ (though without the job at NASA part of course)
That means the question is so context-dependent that any potential answer would only bring insight with that specific context in mind.
That being said, I am a huge fan of practise paired with theory (this is what a good tutor would do). Many people only start to care about theory once they have encountered the problems theory helps with have been encountered in the wild. And getting people to care is one of the first things any educator has to achieve.
There are many who start with the base assumption that theory is worthless, but I'd argue having accurate mental models will greatly improve the speed and quality of the work. Additionally this helps to learn faster, as the question why aomething went wrong in practise can be answered faster and more accurately.
In music you usually have a small amount of one-on-one instruction and then you practice. In tennis you usually have a small number of one-one-lessons and then you practice and play matches.
You could probably do the same for maths. You're given some problems to try to solve and given two hours, then once you've made a serious attempt you get individual tutoring for an hour, then you go back to solving problems and there's a short one-on-one question session at the end, let's say 30 minutes. Then you have a 5 hour study session with 1.5 hours of teacher time, so he can have around three students.
Moving forward to the next chapter required, exactly as described in that paper, the completion of a problem set and then a score of at least 90% on a test demonstrating mastery of the previous chapter, sometimes accompanied by also demonstrating that skill in a lab. But far from 1 on 1, this entire class was effectively 0 on infinity. The teaching assistant/proctors that we engaged with were there only to grade your work and provided minimal feedback.
And indeed it was one of the most educational 'classes' I ever took. But I think this challenges the concept that it has anything to do with 1 on 1 attention. But rather the outcome seems practically tautological - a good way to get people to perform to the point of mastery is to require that they perform to the point of mastery. Of course, at scale, all you're really doing is weeding out the people that are unable to achieve mastery. And indeed that class was considered a weed out course.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem
What you describe seems to be a very poor implementation of mastery learning. But if the tutor is completely disengaged even 1 on 1 tutoring is unlikely to have good effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system
Much of graduate education in the US seems similar.
(It always seemed like I learned it, but when faced with the problem sets I discovered I hadn't learned anything yet.)
It's the same with everything. You can watch a yootoob video on rebuilding a carburetor all day, but you don't know nuttin until you take it apart yourself.
I decided to learn to ride a dirtbike. I took some personal instruction from an expert, and promptly crashed. Again and again and again. Finally, my body figured out how to coordinate the controls.
Can't learn how to double clutch downshift from watching a video, either.
Every time, I have to stop and think through it step by step. My recent rides have all been constantly up and down shifting, in order to get it properly into muscle memory. I was annoyed that my car shifting skills did not transfer.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wn5KqWwP6uQ
Basically lots and lots of lots of practice.
I did a snowboarding course once, and it was largely useless because they didn’t actually explain any of the mechanics of how the board actually worked beyond seesawing mostly-sideways down the ultra beginner slope. It wasn’t until I had a chance to experiment that I started actually figuring out anything useful.
I absolutely taught myself how to double-clutch from YouTube and Initial D, though. :D (Plus copious practice, of course.)
Another weird thing. I've been using the same text editor for 40 years. I no longer remember what the commands are - but I can still edit files just fine. Sometimes I watch my fingers to see what the command actually is.
I learned how to solve the Rubik cube some years ago and I found the same thing. I instinctively know the sequence of steps but I would find it very hard to actually write it down.
High-school and undergraduate science classes tend to pair lectures with labs. Practical work is very much the focus of those labs, and the lab instructors work closely with students who need help. And a postgraduate degree typically involves a student working side-by-side with a professor on practical work.
As for the pyramid model, I think the author makes some good points, especially for the grade-school level. However, it's simply a fact that being comfortable with adding comes in handy before moving on to multiplying.
Good teachers find ways to motivate students, and adjust those ways as the years flow by. They know how to do their job, and I trust them to find the best practices.
One thing I've heard from many teachers, especially those who are notably effective, is that teaching theorists are not of much help. And I see that in the silly trends that higher-ups impose on teachers. That way of teaching multiplication that has worked for generations? No good -- we must scrap it. The practice of teaching students to write cursive? So quaint - time to toss that in the trash bin. Years later, I see the results of these trends, when students come to university.
The problem of teaching theorists coming up with silly ideas is a result, I fear, of the system of educating educators. How do you get a PhD in a subject? You have to come up with a new idea. Nobody got an advanced graduate degree in education by writing a thesis that said "teaching is fine as it is." No, that PhD student has to say "this is broken, and here's how to fix it." But some things just aren't quite broken, not really. Sure, some adjustments might be helpful. More one-on-one tutoring would be great. Although then, the non-theorist immediately sees a problem: we don't have enough teachers, as it is.
There are reasons why we started sending children to schools rather than businesses for basic education. There is also little need to reach back to medieval times when comparatively less exploitative (but still imperfect) apprenticeship systems are alive and well in the trades today.
One-on-one practical instruction related specifically to what you want to do is awesome, but there are a lot of difficulties in incentivizing people to supply such instruction.
The master very much cares about your quality, because if it doesn't look like his quality nobody will buy it. If the quality goes down to much, there will be complaints to the guilt and he looses its ability to do business.
If you have problems with your master you can look for another one. The good always needed to reject prentices, the bad had nobody showing up. In-fact you were required to stay with multiple masters.
If you complain about them not having an 8-hour day, nobody had that in the middle ages. But tradesman were more of the richer people in a city, maybe behind tradesman.
Also, apprentices duties involved also general housework and pretty much any random thing they told you to do. They would beat you if they thought you do not do what they want and you would be serving literally whole day and that was it. And no it was not whole day of learning. Based on book I read, that frequently involved things wife of the master ordered - they had nothing to do with the trade and that was normal.
With eating, you would wait behind the master while their lunch and tend eat whatever remained.
The fact that these puzzles can then be used to do cool things is almost just a fortunate coincidence.
I'm not sure how many of those we have available to us. Many are compromised by politics, funding, or the need to act as a daycare.
I learned a lot at the various schools I went to, but the amount I learned seemed to correlate more directly with how invested I was in learning than how well the school was funded. Plenty of schools with better per-pupil funding had significantly worse student achievement rates than where I was.
The only real exception to that is not all schools offer the same curriculum. Back in my day, not every secondary / high school had someone who could teach calculus, though now there's districts that are getting rid of calculus entirely to promote anti-racism. Honestly, I think learning calculus in high school was good for me, even if I've really only needed to calculate integrals once in my programming career.
At University, things were much the same. Undergrad courses focused a bit more on synthesizing than memorizing compared to high school, but not really by much.
All of this is to say that I'm not really sure it's fair to knock the apprentice program since we don't directly experience optimal pedagogy elsewhere.
Sorry about that. At Caltech, we were never given formulas. Everything was derived from scratch. I never memorized anything (but I found after a while I simply knew all the trig identifies!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship_in_Germany
Are you sure about this? Your quoted article only has data from >20 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if nowadays more people study at university than do an apprenticeship
In 2024, according to the "Bundesinstituts für Berufsbildung" 486,700 people started their apprenticeship [0]. In the same period (2024-2025) 490,304 people started their first semester at university/college, according to the "Statistisches Bundesamt" [1].
So you are right, theres more new students than apprentices, but its not by a lot.
[0]: https://www.bibb.de/de/201811.php [1]: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bildun...
I teach SwiftUI to people. I've written books and teach classes. The books don't work nearly as well (because many people just read it instead of actually practicing SwiftUI). The classes I teach ("workshops") are extremely hands on, I try to defer my explanations to after the exercise as much as possible. The feedback is often very positive, and I can tell afterwards that people have really grasped stuff. I know I'm just trying to confirm my biases here as well, but to me, there's nothing better than doing stuff first and then analyzing it.
What I really hate is explaining the solution before explaining the problem. It's a terrible way to teach and it's quite common. I like to say that there are two bad ways to teach: The cookbook (do this, then do that) and the maths textbook (solutions without problems or context). The good way is a combination of them with some additional things that neither of them has, like motivating examples, relevant anecdotes etc.
I've often learned by recalling the concepts from a lecture, reasoning about the material, and imagining what some of the problems would look like while sketching out solutions in my head. It's not any easier than doing the homework, but it is more convenient and flexible. And it can sometimes help with physical skills.
Theory is still important because it communicates how other people understand what they do. But it's certainly not a replacement for reasoning and experience.
I've found the best model of learning is to... not have a "learning process" in the first place. I try to understand as much as possible from as many angles as possible. This means big concepts, minutae, my ideas, other people's philosophies, imagined scenarios, hands-on-experiences, tangentially related concepts, and so on. Being able to answer questions or do the task is more of a side-effect than the intent.
This is just blatantly wrong. If nothing else I myself have shown dogs how to solve problems, but here's a link to Wikipedia for good measure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_in_animals
power in society comes from a knowledge gap, and powerful people have all the incentives to sustain it. consequently education is a battleground, and we, the honest people, have pretty much lost the battles for about a century now.
the OP only makes sense when also considering this aspect of the question.
I certainly am skeptical of someone taking Wikipedia as the Truth.
For example he wrote this: "How Do We Learn Complex Skills? Understanding ACT-R Theory"[0] (ACT-R[1] is written in Common Lisp for HN people).
[0]: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/02/15/act-r/
[1]: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/