Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
Agreed. A book can only teach so much. The rest must be done hands on. Take a look at any recognized "trade" or job and you'll see that it takes years to perfect the skills you need to do it well. In ancient times people quite often began learning a trade as young as 5 and apprenticed well up into their 30's before they were considered a "master" or even a "journeyman" in some cases.
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In a lot of those cases, they were working without literacy, and without any kind of education theory to support them. Apprentices were stuck trying to figure out which parts of what they learned was relevant to the trade, and which parts were the master's personal style, and which parts were just random idiosyncrasies. ("We always use water from THIS stream to cool the horseshoes"... is that because that stream is closest, or "is especially pure"--has ions that help the process, or because it was his master's "lucky stream?" Do we not use well water because it's got minerals that are bad for the smithing, or because it's just such a pain to draw up enough of it, and then there wouldn't be enough to drink?)
One of the things that'd make the recovery go quicker is the science of education--we now know
how to learn. We know how to sort skills into "learn these first; learn those later," and how to arrange a mix of practice and theory to make them part of long-term memory, and how to test to find gaps in knowledge. We have books that let us know what an expert should be able to do; practice is a lot easier if you know what you're working toward.
Admittedly, there are big problems in how these are done in a lot of modern schools--but education 300 years ago often didn't have that kind of formal structure, and it could take a decade to learn what a modern class can teach in a semester. (With, of course,
interested students.)