Confronting the Three Apprenticeships
Towards Human Flourishing: Character, Practical Wisdom, and Professional Formation, p. 150, Mark L. Jones, editor, Paul A. Lewis and Kelly E. Reffitt, eds., Mercer University Press, March 2013
14 Pages Posted: 8 May 2013
Date Written: March 7, 2013
Abstract
This is my chapter contribution to Jones, Lewis, & Reffitt, Towards Human Flourishing: Character, Practical Wisdom, and Professional Formation (Macon, Mercer Univ. Press, 2013). In it, and as the title says, I "confront" the "three apprentices" model of professional formation offered in the Carnegie Report and, most notably, by William M. Sullivan. Drawing upon the work of Michael Polanyi, I argue that the thinking this model encourages for the third apprenticeship is thinking that already occurs, and must already occur, in both of the previous ones. To think otherwise is to make the positivist's mistake of believing that there can be a clear distinction between fact and value, a mistake which makes a mockery of the very idea of a professional practice. Our current teaching is necessarily already holistic; it already and of necessarily "integrates" all learning withing the practice, although we seldom notice that it does, and the "first apprenticeship," in Sullivan's terms, always necessarily presupposes the second and the third -- it is, in fact, already teleologically driven in terms of the practice's ideal. Once this critique of the "three apprenticeships" is in place, it allows us to see that Sullivan's "citizenship" claim for the "third apprenticeship" is, in fact, just another failed attempt to avoid recognizing that the practice itself makes a moral claim upon us, an attempt which renders our practice morally incoherent. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of moral identities, returning to themes I have argued before.
Keywords: three apprenticeships, Polanyi, William Sullivan, practice, practical wisdom, character ideals, skills, professional formation, professional identity, professionalism, Aristotle, citizenship
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