Cognitive Apprenticeship
Throughout most of history, teaching and learning have been based on apprenticeship. Children learned how to speak, grow crops, construct furniture, and make clothes. But they didn't go to school to learn these things; instead, adults in their family and in their communities showed them how, and helped them do it. Even in modern societies, we learn some important things through apprenticeship: we learn our first language from our families, employees learn critical job skills in the first months of a new job, and scientists learn how to conduct world-class research by working side-by-side with senior scientists as part of their doctoral training. But for most other kinds of knowledge, schooling has replaced apprenticeship. The number of students pursuing an education has dramatically increased in the last two centuries, and it gradually became impossible to use apprenticeship on the large scale of modern schools. Apprenticeship requires a very small teacher-to-learner ratio, and this is not realistic in the large educational systems of modern industrial economies.