Technologies of Learning
Apprenticeship in Antwerp from the 15th Century to the End of the Ancien Regime
By (author) Bert De Munck
The importance of training and education is on the increase. While the production of ‘human capital’ is seen as a motor for a competitive economy, skills and expertise proof to be necessary for social mobility. Remarkably, in conceiving modern forms of ‘apprenticeship’, several mechanisms from the acien regime, seem to return. The difference between public and private initiative is disappearing, education and training is being confused, and in order to acquire generic skills as flexibility, communicability, self-rule, creativity and so on, youngsters have to learn ‘in context’. Even for maths, scholars now talk of ‘situated learning’.Before the advent of a formal schooling system, training took place on the shop floor, under the roof of a master. The apprentice not only worked but also lived in his master’s house and was thus trained and educated at the same time. In cities, this system was formally complemented by an official apprenticeship system, prescribing a minimum term to serve and an obligatory masterpiece for those who wanted to become masters themselves. Traditionally, historians see this as an archaic and backward way of training, yet this book’s aim is to show that is was instead a very flexible and dynamic system, perfectly in tune with the demands of an early modern economy.In order to understand it fully, however, we should differentiate the informal training system organised via a ‘free market’ of indentures on the one hand and the institutionalised system of craft guilds on the other. In Antwerp, early modern guilds had a project of ’emancipating’ their members. They didn’t simply produce certain skills, but through a system of quality marks defended the honour of craftsmen. This is the difference with current practices. By representing hands-on skills as superior, guilds supplied a sort of symbolic capital for workers.
- By (author) Bert De Munck
Other Titles in this Series
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Representations of Executioners in Northern France and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages
Volume 8
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Le role economique des financiers piemontais dans les villes du duche de Brabant (XIIIe-XIVe siecle)
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For the Common Good
State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy, 1477-1482
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Subaltern City?
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Volume 46
La police de Bruxelles entre reformes et revolutions (1748-1814)
Police urbaine et modernite
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Message in a Bottle
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Volume 57
Urban public debts, urban government and the market for annuities in Western Europe (14th-18th centuries)
Volume 3
Public Opinion and Political Contest in Late Medieval Paris
The Parisian Bourgeois and his Community, 1400-1450
Volume 60
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes in Interregional Perspective
The Low Countries and Neighbouring German Territories (14th-17th centuries)
Volume 36
Les identites urbaines au Moyen Age. Regards sur les villes du Midi francais
Actes du colloque de Montpellier 8-9 decembre 2011
Volume 32
Governments of the Universitates
Urban Communities of Sicily in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
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Sociabilite urbaine et criminalisation etatique
La justice namuroise face a la violence de 1360 a 1555
Volume 39
The Seven Sorrows Confraternity of Brussels
Drama, Ceremony, and Art Patronage (16th-17th Centuries)
Volume 37
Moving Pictures. Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th-18th Centuries
Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th-18th Centuries
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