#apprenticeship

Tagged apprenticeship · show all articles

A thatched roof under repair seen from the scaffold, one bay stripped to bare rafters and battens beside a finished dressed coat, with a single yealm of combed wheat reed sitting proud on the boundary course

Apprenticeship as Information Transfer

A technique survives only if it is copied faithfully enough to be improved upon. Thatching, transmission-chain experiments and the unsettled population-size debate show why craft skill has always travelled through people rather than pages.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 9, 2026 · 17 min read

A hand-operated stocking frame in a whitewashed workshop with a partly knitted worsted web hanging from its needle bar, a cast lead weight swinging slightly on the web, a chalked slate of piece rates propped against the frame and a stool pushed back from the treadles

Labour & Technology

What the Machine Breakers Actually Wanted

The framebreakers of 1811 were not protesting machinery. They were protesting the use of machinery to evade apprenticeship, quality customs and agreed piece rates — and that is the part the word Luddite erases.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 17 min read

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