its broadest sense); to time; and, finally, to mass production. Let’s look at each of these in turn.


Quality: the craft attitude implies, first, an


absolute commitment to the pursuit of quality, with the practical recognition that this may not always be achieved to the same degree. Edmund de Waal bluntly describes this as ‘a contempt for shoddiness’. Second, it seeks to work as efficiently as possible, in terms of time, the cost of materials, and the sustainability of the workshop, as long as quality is not compromised; and, finally, it assumes that the ultimate arbiter of quality, efficiency,


evaluation of each other’s work. This is the team scenario in which there is creative tension between individuals’ strengths and weaknesses and the collective expertise of the team as a whole. This has been described as an ‘expansive’ as opposed to a ‘restrictive’ learning culture (see Evans et al, 2002, and Fuller and Unwin, 2008). The dynamic of the workshop also reminds us that although craftworkers typically have a main field of expertise, they need to know about related areas as well: beautiful and useful products are often worked in different materials, and need the combined application of very


“The idea that you can make craftworkers produce better work, or work more efficiently, by setting them quantitative performance targets is clearly at odds with the craft attitude”


and mastery in general is the community of practice, i.e. other practitioners. Practice: this is firstly about a particular orientation towards the discipline of practice, by which I mean respect for the hard, repetitive work required to move towards mastery, commitment to improving practice and knowledge over extended time periods, and respect for other practitioners, for the materials and for the tools of the trade. Second, it is about readiness to collaborate in making, learning, and teaching the craft to less experienced work colleagues. It also involves seeing accidents, mistakes and less-than- perfect work as opportunities for reflection and learning; and acceptance of a more or less informal hierarchy in the workshop, based on length and breadth of experience, but also on the continuous collective evaluation of the quality of work. Teaching and learning: the craft attitude


embodies deliberate and continuous learning through work, with the recognition that this can be both formal and informal; that teaching and developing less experienced colleagues is recognised as an essential part of craft and of improving one’s own practice; that teaching and learning are structured around the continuous search for new and better techniques, practices, and tools; and, finally, that the work is central to the craftworker’s identity: that the character of every worker is embodied in their work. The workshop: The craft workshop is an


environment organised around the needs of practice, as determined by the practitioners, the materials and the tools involved. A key aspect of the workshop is its culture: the extent to which it fosters and supports authentic communication between practitioners, and a mutuality which enables constructive


10 ADULTS LEARNING APRIL 2011


different skills and knowledge. Craftworkers are specialised, their skills have limits, but they are continually learning more about related fields, they work closely with different specialists, and are curious about their work. Workshops facilitate this interdisciplinary practice as far as they can, and continuously evolve so as to do so. Time: it is an inherent quality of craft that knowledge, skill and expertise are hard-won, through long hours, days, weeks, months and years of practice. The craft attitude is suspicious of easy achievement, precocious skill, any work which seems to have been achieved by cutting corners in terms of time. It recognises that while tools make work easier and quicker, the tools themselves have been developed through extended processes of experimentation by hundreds of practitioners, perhaps over centuries. In general, it is an axiom of craft that time is a sine qua non for the sustained achievement of high-quality work, and that it is time, filled with sustained practice and learning, that confers expertise – there are no short-cuts to mastery. Mass production: the aim of craft is not to


produce wholly standardised artefacts, but to reveal the potential of material worked by knowledgeable practice. Mass standardised production eliminates the human and the particular from the production process (these are seen as embodying ‘error’); its products are in a very real sense ‘lifeless’, whereas craft aims to maximise the human and the particular in the production process, and embody these in artefacts. Dickens implies all of this in Hard Times in his condemnation of teacher training systems in the mid-nineteenth century:


So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred


and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.


This quotation is, of course, from a novel in which the factory system, and the moral philosophy which generated it, is quite clearly delineated as anti-human. The same ideas are explored by Kipling, in his story The Wrong Thing, from a slightly different perspective in which the craft attitude is shown as being distorted and undermined by the institutionalisation of demarcation between different craft specialisms, first in the medieval guilds, and later in some aspects of early twentieth-century trade unionism. It is an irony that one of the main areas in which the concept of craft survives in the twenty-first century is in thinking about industrial work which is demarcated into separate crafts for the protection of employment. This point is not just a historical one, but highly topical: there are indications that digitisation of craft expertise in the ‘brainwork industries’ (including teaching) may be leading to social and political consequences similar to those produced by the division of labour and the subordination of humans to machines within the factory system (Brown et al, 2011). What Dickens and Kipling remind us so powerfully, however, is that these are moral issues, not merely matters of efficiency or ‘what works’.


Outright contradiction Another way of delineating the craft attitude is to look at aspects of life and work which sit uneasily, or are in tension, or even in outright contradiction with it. Among these is, first, the idea that the outcomes of craft can be evaluated, compared and enumerated objectively. From the perspective of craft, quality is apprehended through the practice of judgement, usually by ‘masters’ of the craft. This judgement may be aided by numerical indicators, but is never determined solely by them, because craftwork does not intend to produce artefacts which are ‘the same but better’ than others, it aims to produce objects that embody the humanity of their maker, and which reflect the highly specific qualities of the materials being used. It is a central tenet of the craft attitude that although craft objects can be compared in a general way, they are not essentially comparable. Richard Sennett puts this another way:


What do we mean by good-quality work? One answer is how something should be done, the other is getting it to work. This is a difference between correctness and functionality. Ideally, there should be no conflict; in the real world, there is. Often we subscribe to a standard of correctness that is rarely if ever reached. (Sennett, 2008)


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