Apprenticeship and Industry Leadership Links
Yes, my last post of the year is a links post
Thanks to significant peer pressure from some of my substack writing buddies, and significant time pressure from preparing for a family trip to India, I’ve been convinced to try out a links post.
So here’s a collection of things I’ve been reading that are more (or less) related to apprenticeships and sector leadership in education and training. In no particular order, on to the links!
Thanks to Alexander Kustov’s links post, I found myself learning about one Japanese immigration program that involves taking in un-skilled labor and training them up over several years. To me, it seems like a cultural and vocational apprenticeship at the same time.
I just barely dipped my toe into the water of Singapore’s SkillsFuture movement and was nodding along to the call for sector skills compacts. So now I have to learn more about Singapore’s training system - let me know in the comments if you have ideas where I should start.
Random Walk had a good piece charting how landing that first job has been a challenge for young folks since before the pandemic. It’s almost like there’s a structural challenge to landing a job without experience. If only there was some sort of model where young people could get trained on the job…
The UCSD report on the worsening academic preparation of their entering class has been making the rounds. I liked Kelsey Piper’s write-up for The Argument the best. It reminded me of the points I made in a previous post about the need to re-orient our education systems around reality instead of arbitrary and easily gamed metrics.
Here’s my hot policy take for how to fix math education: Just like how (successful states) hold kids back in 3rd grade when they can’t read, schools should hold kids back until they master fractions, decimals, and percents.
And finally, a post about Tom Cruise. Like many, I am a big fan of Tom Cruise running. He just has the most cinematic run I’ve ever seen. So, I really enjoyed this post on Tom Cruise and ‘embodied knowledge.’ And it made me think that this is the type of knowledge that apprenticeship is well-suited to build.
Alright, time to go finish packing! Thank you for subscribing, and I’ll be back with more posts in the New Year!