What's My Craft?

I’ve been pondering the medieval practice of craftsmen (& craftswomen!) and apprenticeship. In a mostly agrarian society, if you weren’t tending the fields or the flocks for a living, you might be sent off to learn a trade. Blacksmith comes to mind when I think about medieval craftsmen, but you could just as well be apprenticed to an embroiderer or a potter. But let’s use the blacksmith example for now.

My un-researched impression is that medieval craftsmen did not regularly take on multiple apprentices. If you currently had one, you’d be loath to take on a second. It’s not like you have several forges and extra equipment to run a blacksmithing class. You’d want to see if your potential apprentice had what it takes before taking on this person for a long commitment. Assuming no glaring problems, you’d then spend however many years it took with one-on-one instruction. The skills you have acquired as an expert blacksmith took many years of practice, and to maintain your reputation, your apprentice had better learn well.

Today’s classroom of one teacher to tens or maybe hundreds of students is a rather modern invention. Did it arise as population density increased, and there just needed to be a place to plop these youngsters? I don’t know, but I’m sure someone has written a history. In any case, as a society we somehow decided that everyone needed to know some “basics” – reading, writing, arithmetic, and eventually more. As knowledge in different areas grew and became increasingly diversified, more was piled into the curriculum. Craftsmen of the medieval slant disappeared, replaced by industrial machines. Cogs and the conveyor belt moved things along in a factory. The modern educational-industrial complex seems to have imbibed some of the same flavor.

The medieval craftsman had a physical product. For the blacksmith, these could be hoes, horseshoes, or hand-axes. The embroiderer and the potter would similarly have a product to display or sell. Were there craftsmen who did not craft a physical product? Perhaps a bard or a storyteller could make a living by providing a service; ephemeral it may be but there were those willing to pay for these services. Tutors for one’s children were not far behind, at least for the few who were wealthy. So perhaps teaching could be thought of as a service-craft. It does not produce a physical object as a product. It’s end-product, an “educated” individual is not so easy to classify.

I’d like to think of myself as a craftsman of sorts. Teaching is my craft. Over years of experience I’ve honed it well, or at least well-suited to the ethos of a classroom of the liberal arts college. My ballast of knowledge is chemistry, i.e., I’m at my best when teaching chemistry, and would probably do poorly teaching in areas where I had little subject knowledge. Part of my life mirrors the medieval craftsman – when I take on research students. They work with me one-on-one learning how to do research in computational chemistry, and how to think like a chemist. I’d like to think the experience is somewhat helpful for the students, even though it’s nowhere as intensive or extensive as a medieval apprentice would be getting. My students learn some, but honestly, not all that much in the short timeframe.

It’s a challenge to evaluate the “product” of my craftsmanship. Yes, one can count the number of papers I’ve published, research students I’ve mentored, grants I’ve written that were funded, etc. And yes, these are counted, because there’s not much else that can be easily counted and evaluated. I’d like to think that I have personally contributed to the “education” of many an individual, but it’s hard to evaluate this. (And yes, I do read all the comments in my end-of-semester teaching evaluations.) Sometimes a former student tells me years later how something I said or did helped them greatly, but those are few and far between, and typically I’d spent one-on-one time in my office chatting with said student on multiple occasions. But for the other one to two thousand students that have passed through my “class”, I can say little to how much I’ve impacted them. Perhaps little.

How did we come up with “mass” education? I’ve scoped out a few books to read this summer to learn more about the history. I think it will be important to gain some historical perspective as we stand on the brink of a new kind of mass-education, one driven by technology, especially thanks to the current Covid-19 pandemic. Technology can both aid or confound teaching, when used well or badly, but technology shouldn’t drive education. Witnessing the rise in “edupreneurship” driven by tech-entrepreneurs, many of whom have little to no teaching experience or expertise is scary. They might say I’m a relic. Outmoded. Like the medieval craftsman who is no more. I don’t harken to living in medieval times, but perhaps there’s something we can learn from thinking about education as a craft, one that requires time and care, and that industrial efficiency isn’t the most important thing in the world.