
Apprenticeships Beat Classrooms - BerislavLopac
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/06/07/apprenticeships/
======
jonahbenton
IMHO this is true in a deep way, even more so for little kids than big people.
From infancy children want to "do-with" and as every parent knows "telling-
how" or "telling-to" works only in the most rare of circumstances, with only
the most mature of kids. But a kid who has learned via "do-with" then
graduates to "do-myself" and then to "i-did-it-myself" the autonomous feeling
from which is the greatest. Then groups can learn "we-did-ourselves" etc.

With big people of course the "apprenticeship beats classrooms" manifests in
so many ways- everyone who "learns more in 4 months of work than in 4 years of
school" is familiar with this.

I love (public) schools and academia and think on the whole they are treasured
institutions, but there is a degree to which their presence and mode of
operation leads to deprioritization of "doing-with", and this is very
unfortunate.

~~~
todd8
I’ve always worked in very technical fields so I feel that my university
education was always essential to my ability to do the job.

Engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians are usually expected to
know more than what 4 months of experience on the job would provide.

~~~
nift
I can relate and agree with this sentiment.

Sure, not everything is applicable but the solid foundation goes a very long
way.

I also see others fail at some tasks because they are not able to understand
the foundations. Not saying it would be solved by going to university, but it
might have helped to study it without tight deadlines and in a world where
nobody has time to wait

------
chongli
If we’re talking about all areas of study, not only traditional trades, then
what is an apprenticeship, really? Is it not merely an education with very low
student-teacher ratio? If that is the case, then of course it would beat the
classroom. It also won’t scale, hence classrooms.

This article does a pretty good job of supporting the advantages of
apprenticeship. It does not, however, provide any support for the self-
directed pseudo-apprenticeship that it advocates. I have little reason to
believe that this model will work for anyone who wasn’t already a capable
autodidact. Apprenticeship without the master are not apprenticeship at all.

~~~
ken
> what is an apprenticeship, really? Is it not merely an education with very
> low student-teacher ratio?

No. There are legal requirements for it [1].

In particular, it is a _job_. Even if you taught algebra one-on-one to
students, that would not be an apprenticeship, because the teacher isn’t a
worker using algebra for their job, and the student isn’t earning $15 an hour
to learn how algebra is used in that profession.

[1]:
[https://www.dol.gov/apprenticeship/toolkit/toolkitfaq.htm#1b](https://www.dol.gov/apprenticeship/toolkit/toolkitfaq.htm#1b)

~~~
chongli
Yeah, so the original article doesn't make any sense as an approach for
society. Parents want their kids to learn algebra in the hope that they might
get into an engineering program. Apprenticeships don't enter into the picture
at all.

Imagine a mathematics professor trying to apprentice a teenager. It wouldn't
work, since the knowledge gap between a high school grad and a working
mathematician is huge. The kid wouldn't have anything useful to contribute for
a very long time.

Perhaps this is why we only see apprenticeships in trades and the like. Those
jobs don't require a huge base of knowledge just to be able to understand
what's going on.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Imagine a mathematics professor trying to apprentice a teenager. It wouldn
> 't work, [...]_

Not quite a high school student, but cf.
[https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-
peak...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-peak-of-the-
math-world-20170627/)

~~~
chongli
This is an amazing story. I don’t think it’s what the author of the article
had in mind though. It sounds like the original argument for apprenticeships
is supposed to be a large scale thing, for potentially all students. I can’t
see that working for the vast majority of stem students, only the very rare
gifted ones.

------
tastroder
"We might not bring back apprenticeships, but by bringing back the features
that work, we can all hopefully learn a bit better."

The piece seems to ignore that apprenticeships are still a thing in quite a
few countries around the world. Here in Germany they developed since the
medieval times this piece seems to find so great, and usually include
stretches of classroom attendance to get the theory across because you just
cannot learn everything by doing in such a setting, I would guess that's even
more true today where even trade companies are quite often relatively
specialized.

~~~
jseliger
True, but in the United States we've spent decades disdaining them and
distributing propaganda that college is the One True Way. This has had many
bad effects: [http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-
boost...](http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-
apprenticeships/) that are obvious to me, having spent many years teaching
freshmen who don't want to be in college and would be better served in
alternate forms of education or work.

------
chrisseaton
I think the best example of a middle-class modern apprenticeship that people
will be able to relate to here is the PhD. It’s an apprenticeship in research
where you’re paired with someone who has mastered the craft and passes it on
1-1 to you by helping you do practical work (actual research with research
outputs) outside of the classroom.

~~~
btrettel
I think ideally a PhD is an apprenticeship. Practice in my experience is
unfortunately not like an apprenticeship, instead it's a low paid job that can
be quite abusive. Plus many of the things you "learn" aren't good for research
in my view, e.g., I think "publish or perish" causes many researchers to avoid
projects with the largest impacts. This is treated as "smart" but I strongly
disagree.

~~~
telchar
That's what makes PhD work a good example I think, because a low-paid job that
can be quite abusive describes apprenticeship very well. It's Inherently
reflective of the quality of the master. If the master is an abusive drunk,
the apprentice is going to have a bad time. Also the apprentices historically
had to do much grunt work like (in blacksmithing, to choose a profession)
churning out nails. Produce or perish.

I think there are advantages to bringing back parts of apprenticeship, but it
is not a system without flaws or weaknesses.

~~~
btrettel
I personally don't mind the grunt work and don't consider that abuse. Grunt
work is either outright useful or a learning experience.

If blacksmiths were academics they would produce a large number of faulty
nails. (One might argue the vast majority would be faulty!) I doubt
blacksmiths would find that acceptable, but many (if not most) academics don't
seem to care too much about quality as long as the paper passes peer review.

A PhD can become abusive when the advisor wants to produce more work when
someone has done more than enough for a PhD. At that point they have a full
researcher getting paid only a fraction of what they could be.

PhD students are paid less than apprentices last I checked, too. According to
this page apprentices are paid roughly 1/3 of what professionals are paid:

[https://smallbusiness.chron.com/apprenticeship-
pay-15304.htm...](https://smallbusiness.chron.com/apprenticeship-
pay-15304.html)

So far, at no point during my PhD was I ever paid 1/3 of what my advisor is,
even if you factor in benefits. I haven't even received a raise (to my
knowledge), but he has.

Again, ideally a PhD is like an apprenticeship, but my experience suggests
that case is rare.

~~~
jayd16
>If blacksmiths were academics they would produce a large number of faulty
nails

Are papers nails in this analogy? I wonder when there was last a nail of
sufficient novelty?

~~~
btrettel
Yes, peer reviewed papers are nails in the analogy. (Non-peer-reviewed work
might as well not exist to many academics in my experience, regardless of its
quality.) There are good nails and bad nails, just like there are good papers
and bad papers, though the criteria for what makes each good differ.

There probably is some innovation in nails still going on. I imagine it's
mostly about manufacturing methods and materials.

------
whiddershins
As I’ve pointed out in other threads, I used to mentor people in audio
engineering, this is now legally very risky as I am immediately vulnerable to
a wide swath of labor regulations in NYC.

Not really worth it anymore.

Meanwhile it is commonly known to be true in many industries that someone is
mostly useless, work productivity wise, when they graduate college. It takes
years for them to “know anything.”

I’m not sure what the solution is, but obviously apprenticeships are a huge
missing piece.

~~~
jayd16
Do you still hire college grads or just anyone? Sure the grads don't have any
experience but it's better than anyone off the street that knows less than
nothing.

------
amursft
It's crazy to me that modern adult life is nothing like a traditional
classroom format, and yet we spend 18 years preparing our kids for it by
having them sit in a room and get talked at. Sure, there other kinds of
activities but lecturing takes up such a huge chunk of the time spent in the
educational system for most people.

Alternatives or complements like apprenticeship that can teach in a different
way are really interesting and exciting to me.

~~~
lilgreenland
I'm a physics and computer science high school teacher, I think lecture takes
up about 5-10% of my classes. This is not unusual in high school. (I'm in Los
Angeles)

On the other hand, when I was a student in college it was about 95% lectures.

~~~
amursft
That's awesome to hear! I'm recalling history, math, science lectures, english
classes. Just thinking back to both high school and college there was a lot of
lecturing.

------
naveen99
Some sports leagues draft kids out of high school. What if companies starting
offering 4 year apprenticeships out of high school to the most promising
students ? How much should they pay these 18 year olds for those 4 years ?
Would the colleges lobby the government to ban apprenticeships ?

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Even if they didnt pay them they would be way ahead of where they would be
with a standard student loan.

The downside is that they'll only learn skills that are valuable for that
specific company.

I think this is the best argument for a tech union. A way to learn with real
world experience, while not being bound to a single company.

~~~
lotsofpulp
>The downside is that they'll only learn skills that are valuable for that
specific company.

In my experience, university did not provide any skills valuable for any
company, other than being useful for networking and a little bit of politics
if you're involved with organizations in the university.

The big value, at least for 18-22 year olds, is from proving that they have
the discipline to put in the work to get into a selective school and/or
achieve high grades in difficult subjects. As an employer, my main concern
when hiring someone is if they are capable, and if they are disciplined enough
to apply themselves. If those two are true for a 22 year old, then there is a
good chance they can be useful regardless of their specific education.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Anecdotes aren’t data - but even though I knew how to code long before my
university CS course - having to do a CS undergrad is the only way _most_
people will learn the boring-but-essential - or hard-to-learn parts of CS or
SE.

For example - I built commercially successful (by my standards) software while
in high-school that used O(n^2) algorithms (!!) - who is is fine for small
applications - but the difference between someone “who can code” and “someone
who can code well” is typically a BSc and an understanding of how to make
things that can scale.

We’re all familiar with the trope of the medium-sized business exec who scoffs
at the invoice of an SWE consultant arguing “my 12-yo nephew could have built
that!” - and they’re not superficially wrong - but their 12yo nephew couldn’t
build something that scales to millions of users and petabytes of data.

I’ve found a quick-and-dirty way of identifying the unwarranted self-confident
types is to ask them how they’d quickly put together a CSV parser - if they
give an answer involving `String.Split` you can tell they don’t have a degree.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I’ve found a quick-and-dirty way of identifying the unwarranted self-
> confident types is to ask them how they’d quickly put together a CSV parser
> - if they give an answer involving `String.Split` you can tell they don’t
> have a degree.

Hmmm. I have a degree in computer science, and I've written a parser. (
[https://github.com/thaumasiotes/regexp](https://github.com/thaumasiotes/regexp)
)

I'm pretty sure it would be faster to put together a CSV parser using
String.Split than to write a streaming parser to handle the problem. You did
specify that you want this done quickly, right?

My immediate thought would be to make sure commas that appear in field values
don't cause spurious splitting. After that, yeah, String.Split.

Can you say more about why this means I don't have a degree?

~~~
imtringued
CSV is far more complicated than just commas and newlines. There is string
quotation and character escaping.

------
duxup
I wonder what the difference is between a classroom with a single teacher
tasked with educating a room of people who might not be interested...and
apprentice with one person who likely is interested.

To me it seems that of course that an apprenticeship works better for that
task....but also not a fair comparison considering the classroom goals and
structure for all sorts of reasons.

I also wonder about how well apprenticeships put forth new ideas or ways of
doing things.

~~~
vezycash
> classroom with a single teacher tasked with educating a room of people who
> might not be interested...and apprentice with one person who likely is
> interested

In my experience, the "should be apprentice" in a class is the one ends up
being frustrated by the class environment because they care.

I see classes like commercial farms - everyone gets the same amount of water,
nutrients, sunlight... An apprentice's master is like an expert gardener who
notice when one plant needs less sunlight and provides shade. And provides
calcium when one plant needs it.

That's why small time farmers are usually the ones who create freakishly big
tomatoes, carrots, pumpkins... These freakish farm produces created through
painstaking personalized education would be called geniuses if they were
humans.

In small classes, students often get this personalized treatment. But majority
of classes aren't small.

~~~
duxup
I think that's accurate, but really illustrates my point that this is a more
apples to oranges type comparison.

Classrooms (at least thinking of a US style education) are for the masses.

Apprenticeships are for the handful of folks who really care ... that's not
many people and in so many ways really isn't for everyone.

------
acomjean
I work in software supporting a field I knew little about (genetics). After 6
months of coding up tools, going to talks and kinda getting the gist, I
started taking a couple classes. It really helped my fill in some gaps in my
background knowledge and I’d wished I’d done so sooner.

So I think both learning methods have their place.

------
keiferski
The intermingling of economic-focused and academic-focused educational systems
is the core cause of this issue. Universities used to be for scholars, whereas
apprenticeships were for tradespeople. Over the past century, universities
have essentially replaced the role of trade school/master and thus you get the
intellectual abstraction process applied to professions which have very little
use for it.

There are very worthwhile areas of knowledge which have no economic value in
the current system. Ergo the apprenticeship model makes no sense for a field
like literature or philosophy. They belong in the academy, not the workshop.

~~~
analog31
Oddly enough, one college major is well known to have limited economic value:
Music. Yet music education follows the apprenticeship model. Individual
lessons, practice, ensembles, and performances, are central to the education
of music performance majors.

~~~
zozbot234
Composition and improvisation (where relevant - mostly surviving today in
performance on the organ, and almost totally dead in other instruments) are
also taught the same way. Somewhat surprising perhaps, since there's actually
quite a bit of intellectual engagement with these topics, too - but a heavily
practical attitude has long been recognized as yielding the best results.

~~~
analog31
I'm a jazz musician, but learned improvisation on the bandstand. It was
certainly "learning the hard way," and I'm not sure I recommend it.

I think one reason for needing practice is that in either of those areas,
you're going to suck for a long time before you get good at it. Maybe this is
true of writing too. The academic environment is a place where you can get
that kind of practice.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I think one reason for needing practice is that in either of those areas,
> you're going to suck for a long time before you get good at it. Maybe this
> is true of writing too.

It is true of writing too.

------
onei
The company I work for is about to take 2 software engineering apprentices for
the first time. As far as I can tell, we're not equipped for teaching any
theory and as CompSci for under 18s is fairly uncommon in the UK, it's
unlikely they're going to have a solid grounding beforehand. Does anyone have
experience on what kind of environment and investment of people is required to
make a good apprenticeship for this field? Everyone at the company did a
CompSci or similar degree, but I feel that apprenticeships are a fundamentally
different model.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
The ideal situation is to pair each apprentice with an experienced dev, with a
fixed time allocated every day to help them.

Yes, it's costly. Yes, the experienced dev needs to be ok with it.

Then you find small tasks you know people can google their way around and that
you know won't lead to a disaster if they are done badly or if something
break.

Then you increment.

Apprentices are very slow and very demanding at the beginning. Once they are
productive though, they have the best cost/benefit ratio of your company,
provided you did the first steps well.

Source: been an apprentice for 5 years, and all my classmates were.

~~~
ip26
The missing piece seems to be some way to ensure the apprentice sticks around
once they become valuable. If they are immediately poached with a high salary
you can't afford to pay, you get nothing for your troubles of teaching them.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
See my other comment, this is no different that keeping any other employee
around.

~~~
ip26
And ordinary employees leave all the time. But they "pay off" sooner, because
the up front investment is lower.

Even in Germany today there are additional assurances to make sure an
apprentice isn't immediately poached after becoming a journeyman.

------
A1phab3t
Feels a little like some assumptions are being made in the comments here.
Apprenticeships are still a thing in the US. Example:
[https://does.dc.gov/service/apprenticeships](https://does.dc.gov/service/apprenticeships)

I have a friend who is in this program now to become an electrician. She has
been working, for pay, on active construction sites for over a year, after
completing introductory training/classroom work.

Accepting an apprentice means taking a preliminary dip in your own
productivity, until such time as the apprentice can contribute a net gain to
your unit. Someone has to take the brunt of that-- with electricians, for
example, the introductory training helps them not to kill themselves.

Many subjects combine an academic component with an apprenticeship component.
Physicians spend a lot of time in clinics as med students before they become
full-fledged doctors. Teachers have to student-teach prior to becoming full-
fledged teachers.

Cosmetology, hair styling, auto mechanics, the list goes on. All of these
professions combine some academic study of principles with intense, prolonged
hands-on training.

In the US if you look at the regulations for unpaid interns, the employing
organization must provide experiences equivalent to the amount of learning the
intern would recieve in a college course. There's some idea of treating unpaid
interns as unskilled labor, but that as far as I know is against the intent of
the "unpaid intern" concept and is, technically, illegal.

------
sigsergv
The author is messing up with two very different topics: (kind of fundamental)
education in classrooms (that existed 500 years ago too) and practical
craftmanship, that exists now in a broad range of professions including
software engineering. So the text looks like a preparation of strawman.

~~~
dkmn
That is an interesting point (framing as a strawman). Something was bugging me
in the article, though I think I agree with many of the points made, and your
comment recalled it to mind.

Both fundamental and practical education matter in most realms.

Practical example: medicine (modern allopathic "western" medicine, i.e. the
job of a physician, something I know and can comment about relative to both
basic science and software). The author implies that time is "wasted" in basic
science, when students could simply be more involved with patients. Leaving
the value of patient contact aside (most schools do involve students early
these days to provide context and motivation), one of the whole points is to
provide a multi-level framework for better incorporating later knowledge. This
allows a person to adjudicate new findings and therapies, guide their patient
and practice, figure out novel situations of atypical presentations (often due
to overlapping processes or red herrings).

Anyhow, I'm sure others can think of similar examples in fields they know.

Also, perhaps one of the western European folks here can comment, but I seem
to recall that trade apprentices in, say, Germany, generally still have a
pretty decent core knowledge of math, language, etc from school. I.e. pretty
comparable to an "academic track" US high school student, excepting AP
courses. True?

~~~
hocuspocus
> Also, perhaps one of the western European folks here can comment, but I seem
> to recall that trade apprentices in, say, Germany, generally still have a
> pretty decent core knowledge of math, language, etc from school. I.e. pretty
> comparable to an "academic track" US high school student, excepting AP
> courses. True?

I'm not sure about Germany, but in Switzerland, "school" is mandatory until
the end of middle-school. After that it can really be anything between zero
classes, 100% on-the-job apprenticeship and general, academic track high-
school. Selection is mostly done by grades, since they're a good indicator
whether school/classes/lectures work for a student or not. Most people go to
trade schools and will indeed attend core math, language, geography/history
classes. But the amount and depth of these classes aren't close to general
high-school. They cover maybe 50-60% of the material. And then you'll have
people in dual school/on-the-job training, where core classes are really
reduced to the bare minimum.

Note that all tracks offer bridges to tertiary education, at vocational
universities or even sometimes proper universities, so that you aren't stuck
forever if you didn't take education seriously as a teenager.

------
kls
I think the diagrams of the pyramid vs the puzzle was a good one and reflect
how I learn, I personally don't get concepts until I have touched them. I was
never really good at taking a concept from a book and visualizing it.

This is why I excelled at Chemistry, Computers and real world Physics but
never really excelled at basic math (to this day I convert fractions to
decimals because my mind does not think it fractions). Anyways what I came her
to say is once I get the basic concept from hands on labs, then it is very
easy for me to get the math, because I can visualize what the math is doing. I
seem to only learn from real world application and by doing it. So I think
there is value in learning the how, and then layering the theory on after that
fact. It seems to stick for me. Then again we all learn differently.

I personally learned Geometry and Trig from carpentry and 3d modeling.

I learned algebra and statistics from building and modifying internal
combustion engines.

I learned business math from building accounting systems.

All of these I learned after hand on apprenticeship and it made it very easy
for me to grasp and retain the mathematical concepts.

I have joked before about starting the "Boys School for the Mechanically
Inclined" to teach boys that learn like I do. I was fortunate and driven
enough to understand my learning disabilities, but I see bright boys flounder
and can see it's due to the way they are being taught. It really is a shame.

------
verst
In a way modern coding bootcamps that offer internship placements appear
similar to me to the German-style vocational schooling (apprenticeships +
classes).

I have a CS degree, but I find bootcamp graduates to have more practical
knowledge for many positions right upon graduation. At least this is true
speaking from my personal experience and what I have observed.

Most jobs in the US don't truly require a university degree (the knowledge
isn't actually required) and I'd argue that most "coding jobs" (deliberate
choice of words) don't either.

~~~
mothsonasloth
Yes but the problem is with the bootcamps I have dealt with in the UK, is that
they are in a "bums on seats" philosophy.

They charge crazy money for a 3 month bootcamp, then say people are qualified
to work as a software engineer. They then turn up at a company and are lacking
in various areas.

Graduates are not very useful at the star, however they have a foundation and
a good percentage have done an internship. So there's more to work with.

There needs to be standards implemented and companies need to get together to
say "we expect x,y and z from boot camp graduates"

Otherwise, I could go an setup a bootcamp tomorrow and take peoples cash and
just make them watch youtube videos of react.js

"Its not my problem if you don't get it"

------
cameronbrown
I'm doing an apprenticeship at a FAANG company; it's been an amazing
experience so far. I feel like I've learned a hell of a lot more about
software engineering from a few code reviews than sitting in lectures and
reading textbooks (which don't work as well for me).

The value in university seems to be the brand, the networking opportunities
and the environment, not the education.

~~~
astura
This is a common thing to say because it's "cool" now but I don't think it's
even a little bit true at all. The value of my University was almost entirely
the education, I learned a massive amount and did crap tons of homework and
projects (not just lectures and books). I was completely and entirely prepared
for a good job in software development. I never even wrote "Hello World"
before college.

I have a family member who signed up for an apprenticeship, but the waiting
list was many years long. He was told that he could get higher on the list (or
maybe skip the list entirely, can't recall exactly) by getting an associates
degree. So he went to a community college to get the associates degree. Once
he got the associates degree, however, he no longer needed the internship and
went right into the workforce. I never asked him directly how much he makes,
but I suspect it's more than I do because he's in a specialist field.

~~~
Zarath
I agree, I don't know where these people went to school, but maybe they are
just in bad CS programs.

------
pm90
There are a bunch of comments which are conflating the lack of apprenticeships
with the general recommendation of college as a basic requirement for young
people, which doesn't make sense. You can do both: this is how doctors learn
today: 4 year college followed by Residency of some sort. The same model could
be replicated for other fields if they so demanded.

An equally plausible theory is that the American economy has moved away from
primary, low-tech factory jobs to high-tech ones that require a more educated
workforce, and the Education sector has responded to that demand. The other
somewhat unrelated factor has been the explosion of student loan debt which
exploited that demand for education for its own ends.

I would also speculate that having the experience of college and mixing and
meeting with people from all over the country is a benefit that is often
overlooked today; Americans that don't experience that lose out on an
opportunity to meet and know people that they never would have otherwise.

------
6510
Imagine what happens if you bring the baby to the bakery and have him or her
grow up there. Everything would become overly obvious. Lets also imagine how
answering questions improves your skill further. The baby will have you
rethink everything, your very essence, to eventually rebel against your
methods, your very being :)

------
ineedasername
Despite the title, the author isn't really saying there should be less
classroom learning, only that whatever material is being learned should have a
purpose-driven real world application tied into it.

Sure, depending on the specifics that could mean less classroom time as well,
but that isn't a necessary result of the idea, just a possible one.

