Talking Tuesday: Apprenticeship, the Craftsman, and Restoring Mayberry

I recently finished reading Overdressed, which is a nice follow up book to Cheap (different author, but same topic; Overdressed is just focused specifically on clothing).  I have a lot of thoughts about the book, but I think Brian Kaller exactly articulated what has been on my mind with his post from yesterday, where he discusses going to see a horse farrier, a young man who learned his craft with a four-year apprenticeship, and now finds himself with more work he can handle.  The world is what we make of it, and I think our current system cannot long last given the strains on the environment, the dislocation of communities, and the basic alienation that comes with modern living.  At some point, something has got to give.  It is just hard to see how or where that will happen, and what the fall out will be.

In any case, I've always made a strong case for apprenticeship, tradesmanship, and vocational schooling above traditional higher education, as it serves many more people, and definitely serves society as a whole better.  I say this as someone who was an academic, and enjoyed graduate school and the whole scene.  I think at the end of the day, however, we need to be training our children to do things, to make, fix, repair, get their hands dirty. 

I'm struggling lately with a vision of simple life that is quite incompatible with city living.  It probably is incompatible with post modern life, setting aside the urban setting, but that vision sits in my brain and tantalizes me, makes me long for wide open spaces, agrarian existence, in rhythm with the seasons, living a bit closer to the ground.  I find myself with a renewed interest in the ways of doing from pre-modern times.  I keep thinking about the ways that we are constantly told to eat, and how at odds it is with the ways that people ate in the times before supermarkets, and food chains that stretched from coast to coast.  I think about the rhythms of the day, and the pace of life, and how much slower it all was.  The price of social mobility is social isolation and the breakdown of communal culture.  As much as the online marketplace makes my life easier, as much as I enjoy social media, and utilize e-mail and other forms of digital communication, I do think there is a human cost involved, not just for me, but for the larger community in the frenetic pace of it all, in the abstraction of work and doing, in the long distances we travel for work and school, and how far we must go to make a life.  

Kaller writes: 

"Of course, most people did not attain such rank, but most people of any rank had a palette of survival skills unknown to almost any modern person. Farmers with little money or formal education would have known how to deliver a calf, weave a basket, butcher a pig, keep bees, shear sheep, turn autumn fruit into wine or spirits, make hay and silage, forage for wild plants, dig the peat bog for winter fuel and coppice trees on a timetable that stretched across the generations."

Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry, Able Hands, November 3, 2014 

Lately, I find myself craving the stolidity of place in a fixed system, a human scale to daily interaction, and a more organic rhythm to life.  The city suffocates me sometimes.  I just don't know how to find these things in the post modern world, or at least, the post modern world in a busy urban setting.  I continue to think on these things, and to ponder, and to dream about wide open spaces.  With horses.