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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory
To apprentice, historically, has been to learn a trade: to study with and work beside a master craftsman – a cabinet maker, potter, or jeweler, for example – for a period of time in which to refine a professional skill. Modern iterations continue in certain skills – plumbing and electrical, often sponsored by unions – but the education model has been mostly lost and forgotten.
Here, in Maine, however, the apprentice movement thrives, fostered by one Lance Lee, in Rockland. Lee founded the Apprenticeshop, a program for the learning of traditional small craft construction and associated seamanship and contrapuntal opportunity to preserve authentic skills and maritime traditions. Lee recently published a small pamphlet, Apprenticing – A Manifesto, as a consummate explanation of and argument for experience and engagement as a most effective way of learning and living in a time when education is challenged by convention, complexity, technology, and decline
In the Manifesto, Lee asks: “what does apprenticing provide? It is not a technique. It is timeless, essential, and ultimately more pragmatic…Apprenticing is the taproot of the handmade world…Apprenticing means investing in capability…valuing the act, rather than the artifact…its virtues are: paradox, not certainty; immersion, not detachment; voluntary, not compelled; simplicity, not complexity; optimism, not pessimism; creativity, not imitation; reverence, not indifference; discipline, not indulgence; joy, not pleasure; play, not entertainment; wisdom, not knowledge… Central to all of this is contact – with the materials and elements of the natural world; skills – involving the head, hands, and heart; and ritual – an intentional practice of care enhancing the interplay between spirit and action, word and deed.”
The Apprenticeshop was established in 1972 first in Bath, Maine, then Rockport, then Rockland, where its waterfront buildings and pier enable a program that unites principles with behaviors – short- and long-term apprenticeships building small craft under the supervision of a Master Builder, taking those boats under oar and sail into the adjacent Bay, and offering summer sailing, rowing, and seamanship programs of youth, from the local schools and on-the-water. It is a place of constant activity: the sound of saws and planes, hammer and nail, the constant sharing of solutions for problems, the quiet individual satisfaction of a true cut, true fit, as part of the collective learning experience. Over its 50 year history, The Shop has graduated over 500 apprentices, many of which have carried on as independent builders, shipyard workers, and founders of similar programs and shops in the United States, Norway, France, Italy, and the Basque Country [Spain].
It has become a quiet movement, with correspondent revival of traditional craft, an international Contest of Seamanship, and extraordinary resurgence of traditional construction and youth participation programs in the coastal towns of Atlantic France and in the Azores; From this enthusiastic continuity comes also a renewed interest in the re-construction and replication of traditional small craft boat design, and the many festivals worldwide, from Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, to the Netherlands, from Northern Ireland to Ukraine to Russia to Hong Kong to Japan, and all parts in-between. Behind all this lies the transfer of skills that has found a new source of vitality and utility, in large part driven by apprentices who have reveled in personal discovery through experience.
Lance Lee describes the phenomenon as follows: “We are a nation of producers. There are three aspects to the making of the chattels of our time: the place, the product, and the process. Through process, we have product; through product, we have place; through place, we have the exercise of care and community… The entirety is a combination of art and the sublime, natural material and the skill of craft, the affinity…between aesthetics and function as in the stained-glass window, the handle carved by hand, the earthen bowl that warms and pours. The resonance contained within endures, long after the maker has finished the work, through a grandchild’s rowing of the boat…the opening of the door of home…”
Apprenticing is as educational vector for our changing times. It serves young and old as counterpoint to the dislocation and dissatisfaction we see in our children and ourselves. It offers a pro-volutionary path through and forward and is there for the courage of your taking. For further information, go to apprenticeshop.org and “embrace the notion that every student is an apprentice; every teacher a master; every lesson…is a guide from lost to found, from dislocation to self-realization…” into the future.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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