Apprenticeship

Sources

Anglo-American System. Apprenticeships were labor contracts between two parties. One party was the master craftsman or artisan knowledgeable about a trade or business, and the other was a young boy or girl, often an orphan or a child from a poor family, who wanted to pre-pare for that trade. The Statute of Artificers in 1562 had standardized the institutional regulation of apprenticeship in England. The Poor Laws in 1601 had opened apprenticeships to the poorer classes. The American colonies imitated the formal English institution of apprenticeship in many respects, especially the careful moral and occupational supervision, but had modified the system to suit the needs of the colonial economy. Craft guilds, crucial to the system in Britain, never took hold in America. Regulations governing terms of service, entry fees, ages of entry into service, training, and property restrictions were loosened or ignored altogether, largely as a result of the shortage of labor. Apprentices in England would normally be required to serve seven years. In

America apprentices discovered that they could get employment without finishing their contracted time of service because their labor was needed, so apprenticeships of four years became more common. In the colonies boys could be apprenticed until they were twenty-one and girls until they were eighteen or until they married, but these terms varied. Females served apprenticeships under similar regulations as their male counterparts but had fewer occupational choices.

Terms of Contract. Apprenticeships could be either voluntary, with a young person choosing his or her master and negotiating a contract, or compulsory, as arranged by parents, guardians, or governing officers. The training was lengthy and expensive but virtually guaranteed the apprentice a useful skill for life, one that he or she had learned by example and participation. The indenture of apprenticeship was a legally binding document, spelling out the responsibilities of both parties. For example, certain exemplary behavior was expected of apprentices, who usually lived with their masters. They were not allowed to reveal “trade secrets” or misuse the master’s goods. They could not marry, play illegal games, or frequent taverns and playhouses, nor could they be away from their places of work without permission from the master. The master, for his or her part, agreed to instruct the apprentice in a trade and to feed, clothe, lodge, and perhaps educate the youth. But terms could be negotiated. In eighteenth-century America, since labor was scarce, prospective voluntary apprentices were able to bargain with masters for more favorable contract terms, one of which was the education clause, which allowed

them some form of free basic education outside the workplace. They learned their reading and writing during hours when they were not working for their masters, usually at evening schools. Involuntary apprentices and females had less bargaining power in regard to the education clauses of their contracts. In any case boys received more education than girls. However, emphasis on education for apprentices was not uniform throughout the colonies. The Southern colonies were not as concerned about the formal education of apprentices, and by the middle of the eighteenth century slave apprenticeships were curtailed or outlawed in some colonies such as Georgia, which allowed blacks to be apprenticed only to coopers.

Rural v. Urban. Urban areas were filled with craftsmen of all sorts. Trades for males fell into different categories of difficulty and prestige. Among the easiest to learn and the lowest in terms of status were the shoemakers, tailors, and candlemakers. Those ranking somewhere in the middle were carpenters and blacksmiths. At the elite end of the artisan scale, and the most expensive in which to get apprenticed, were trades such as silversmithing and printing. Females chose among limited options. They were most often apprenticed in another household to learn domestic skills, but some received training in a craft or trade, such as spinning, dressmaking, hairdressing, millinery work, or embroidery. In rural areas apprenticeship choices for males and females were much narrower. They did not have the wide variety of specialized crafts that the cities and larger towns had but only those that supplied the needs of the community, such as shoemakers, blacksmiths, and carpenters. Furthermore, the demands of the rural agricultural economy meant that most children had to spend much of their time farming or doing farm chores. Their education choices were constricted as well. In mid-eighteenth-century cities and towns apprentices could meet their basic education needs, guaranteed by their contracts, in one of the numerous evening schools. But for rural apprentices most training and education took place in the home or from plantation tutors in their spare time. Boys learned crafts from their fathers, and girls learned housewifery from their mothers. Whatever reading and writing they learned was often provided informally by family members.

Opportunity. Apprenticeships provided an opportunity for children and adolescents to receive training in a craft or skill and at the same time to learn the basics of reading, writing, and sometimes ciphering. This was particularly important for poor children who usually had no other means of obtaining a formal education unless they could attend one or more years of a free school, set up by charitable means for the purpose of teaching children who could not afford schooling. But apprenticeships ideally offered a dual education: training in a skill as well as the rudiments of education, both of which were protected by law. In this way apprenticeship became an important vehicle for educating colonists in an era when formal education was neither required nor regulated.

Sources

Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978);

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S ADVICE

On 4 January 1757, John Waring, an Anglican clergyman in London and secretary for the Associates of Thomas Bray, wrote a letter to Benjamin Franklin, asking his opinion about the Associates’ plans to start a school for black children in Philadelphia. The following letter is Franklin’s response.

Cravenstreet, Jan. 3. 58.

I send you herewith the Extract of Mr. Sturgeon’s Letter, which I mentioned to you. He is, among us, esteemed a good Man, one that makes a Conscience of the Duties of his Office, in which he is very diligent; and has behaved with so much Discretion, as to gain the general Respect and Good-will of the People. If the Associates of Dr. Bray should think fit to make Tryal of a School for Negro Children in Philadelphia, I know no Person under whose Care it would be more likely to succeed. At present few or none give their Negro Children any Schooling, partly from a Prejudice that Reading and Knowledge in a Slave are both useless and dangerous; and partly from an Unwillingness in the Masters and Mistresses of common Schools to take black Scholars, lest the Parents of the white Children should be disgusted and take them away, not chusing to have their Children mix’d with Slaves in Education, Play, &c. But a separate School for Blacks, under the Care of One, of whom People should have an Opinion that he would be careful to imbue the Minds of their young Slaves with good Principles, might probably have a Number of Blacks sent to it; and if on Experience it should be found useful, and not attended with the ill Consequences commonly apprehended, the Example might be followed in the other Colonies, and encouraged by the Inhabitants in general. I am, Sir, Your most humble Servant.

B FRANKLIN

Source: Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, volume 7 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 356,

William E. Drake, The American School in Transition (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1955);

Huey B. Long, Continuing Education of Adults in Colonial America (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Publications in Continuing Education, 1976);

W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);

Harold W. Stubblefield and Patrick Keane, Adult Education in the American Experience: From the Colonial Period to the Present (San Francisco, Cal.: Jossey-Bass, 1994).