‘The craft so long to lerne’

Ministers have taken to speaking of teaching as a craft. But is the description valid and, if it is, what are the implications for the way in which we think about teaching and organise teacher training and development, asks JAY DERRICK

I

s it useful to think of teaching as craft? It is, according to Michael Gove, the coalition’s Secretary of State for Education: ‘Teaching is a craft and it is

best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’. John Hayes, Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, seems to agree. He told an audience at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA): ‘The instinctive value we feel for craft must be reflected by our education system … this is, this must be the age of the craftsman’. Hayes entitled his speech ‘The craft so long to lerne’, from the first line of Parlement of Foules by Chaucer, itself a translation, via the Latin proverb Ars longa, vita brevis, of the first lines

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of an ancient Greek aphorism by Hippocrates, the father of medicine:

Life is short,

the craft long to learn, opportunity fleeting, experiment fallible, judgement difficult.

Hippocrates was referring to his work as a doctor. How valid is it to use the word craft to describe teaching? Can Hippocrates’s somewhat world-weary sentiments be applied to teaching? And, if we agree that teaching is craft, what implications does this have, for example, for the way we organise the training and development of teachers?

This question is not the same as suggesting

that teaching is like this or that craft: conducting an orchestra, for instance, or gardening, though both of these are quite effective metaphors highlighting different aspects of teaching. I want to explore the idea of craft as a generic concept, to see how useful it might be to apply it to teaching. This approach avoids arguments about whether this or that human activity is or isn’t a craft, or about the difference between art and craft. Such discussions are interesting, but don’t help us much in trying to understand the nature of teaching, the kind of people teachers need to be, and how best to train and support them throughout their careers. This is a timely question, and not just