Education and the Modern Day Guild

The concept of a guild goes far back into history of all cultures.    From the Wikipedia page:

In pre-industrial cities, craftsmen tended to form associations based on their trades, confraternities of textile workers, masons, carpenters, carvers, glassworkers, each of whom controlled secrets of traditionally imparted technology, the “arts” or “mysteries” of their crafts. Usually the founders were free independent master craftsmen………

……Where guilds were in control they shaped labour, production and trade; they had strong controls over instructional capital, and the modern concepts of a lifetime progression of apprentice to craftsman, journeyman, and eventually to widely-recognized master and grandmaster began to emerge.

Now juxtapose this concept with this story from the Union Square Ventures’ “Hacking Education” session:

In her study of anime music video (AMV) creators (Anime Fans), Mizuko Ito interviewed Gepetto, an 18-year-old Brazilian fan. He was first introduced to AMVs through a local friend and started messing around creating AMVs on his own. As his skills developed, however, he sought out the online community of AMV creators on animemusicvideos.org to sharpen his skills. Although he managed to interest a few of his local friends in AMV making, none of them took to it to the extent that he did. He relies heavily on the networked community of editors as sources of knowledge and expertise and as models to aspire to. In his local community, he is now known as a video expert by both his peers and adults. After seeing his AMV work, one of his high-school teachers asked him to teach a video workshop to younger students. He jokes that “even though I know nothing,” to his local community “I am the Greater God of video edit¬ing.” In other words, his engagement with the online interest group helped develop his identity and competence as a video editor well beyond what is typical in his local community.

This is an example of the interaction of a modern guild.  Guilds are knowledge communities, epicenters of communal knowledge.  The internet allows them to assemble more efficiently, form around more focused knowledge areas, and to be more tightly networked.

Our education system–its structure and use of “pieces of paper” as a proxy for skill and knowledge–cause us (particularly students) to forget and misunderstand what it takes to build real skills and valuable expertise.  If you really want to be good at something, you have to tap in and build upon the community surrounding the topic.

The abstract concept of a guild does have a relationship to higher education.  But like all organizations, their inertia is a danger in an evolving world.  And now, in my opinion, much of our education system is more of a barrier between an apprentice and the knowledge community that will  ultimately enable them and give them a context for building real value.

-Kevin
4.29.2010