Apprenticeships: When schooling means more than doing

This paper is theoretically grounded in an educational movement known as unschooling. Unschooling is a learner centered democratic approach to education. Jerry Mintz (2004) defines learner-centered education as "an approach that is based on the interest of the student rather than curriculum driven, where someone else has the idea of what you ought to be learning," and he defines democratic education as "education where students are actually empowered to make decisions about their own education and if they are in a school their own school." This paper is about apprenticeship programs and how schooling and paper certificates have become more important in determining if someone can do a particular job than them actually doing it.