Tag: apprenticeship
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Guiding a New Generation: Six Alternatives to College
In this series on college guidance, we have worked within the framework that most if not all students are destined to attend a four-year college. I began by questioning the current state of affairs in higher education. There is a massive educational-industrial complex that serves as the gateway to the industrial economy. However, many recent…
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Counsels of the Wise, Part 5: Principles and Practice, Examples and Discipline
In the last article we discussed “good instruction” as a preliminary or a forerunner to prudence. While the development of prudence itself must be confirmed through experience, since it requires familiarity with all the particulars of life, it can and must be fostered in the young through implanting the right principles. A great part of…
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The Virtue of Art: Leonardo da Vinci and Renaissance Apprenticeship
It just might be an apocryphal story, but the mastery Leonardo demonstrated early in his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio foretold the eminent career of one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 near Florence in the small Tuscan town of Vinci. The illegitimacy of his birth…
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The Pathway to Mastery: Apprenticeship in the Classroom
A new book landed on my desk around the beginning of the school year. Robert Greene’s Mastery (New York: Viking, 2012) touches on a number of points that are worthy of exploration and consideration. It reads like a mix of historical biography and self help by a writer who is a master of his craft.…
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Practicing Peacefulness: Beginning the School Year in the Right Frame of Mind
With the start of school just around the corner, teachers are gearing up for another year. As usual, summer break has gone by too fast. And yet, at the same time, the attraction of new beginnings lures them back to the classroom. There is something about a fresh start that energizes, awakens, and inspires. How…
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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry
In this series on apprenticeship in the arts we have laid out a vision for the role of the arts in a fully orbed classical Christian education. We began by situating artistry or craftsmanship within a neo-Aristotelian and distinctly Christian purpose of education: namely, the cultivation of moral, intellectual, and spiritual virtues. Then we explored…
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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry
In the previous article we explored the need to counter the passion mindset of our current career counseling by replacing it with a craftsman mindset drawn from a proper understanding of apprenticeship in the arts. Apprenticing students in various forms of artistry (including the liberal arts) constitutes the role of the Academy that is most…
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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World
In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport argues against the well-known Passion Hypothesis of career happiness. He describes the Passion Hypothesis as the idea that “the key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and…
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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry
In the previous two articles in this series exploring Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, I laid out a fivefold division of the arts and a teaching method for training in artistry. My guiding hypothesis is that rethinking education through the Aristotelian paradigm of intellectual virtues will combat some of the typical problems of modern education. Bloom’s Taxonomy…
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Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft
In my previous article in this series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, I discussed the general nature of artistry or craftsmanship under the heading of apprenticeship. Aristotle’s virtue of techne, often translated ‘art’, points to our human capacity to make things, to produce things in the world. Words like ‘artistry’ or ‘craftsmanship’ help to convey in…