Have We Forgotten How to Form Human Capability?

Craft, apprenticeship, and the invisibility of practical intelligence

Was the curve right?

As I studied the shape of the lug, I remembered a question I’d asked my mentor years before.

“Ere, I want it like that.”

Andrew pointed at the lug and shook his head. The cricket was playing quietly on the radio, but this wasn’t the moment to ask about the score. He was beginning to look exasperated with my questions.

As I filed, I was aware that every stroke removed a little metal. Get it wrong and the file cuts in the wrong place. Take too much off and you can’t put it back.

Across the workshop Andrew was setting up a frame on the faceplate, arranging tubes he’d just mitred in less time than it took me to choose the right file. His hands were black with steel dust.

I could feel the pressure to get it right. These lugs were for that frame. Preparing them was my job and he would need them soon.

“Now?” I asked.

“Give it ‘ere.”

He looked at it for a moment.

“It’ll do.”

Looking back, what strikes me is not that Andrew knew the answer. It is that I genuinely could not see what he could see.

I can remember how I felt growing up. I knew I wanted to make things. I was always interested in workshops, tools, and building things. I could spend hours rummaging through old tools in our garage, picking them up and wondering what they were for.

At school there never quite seemed to be an outlet for this part of my character. I knew this world existed. My grandfather was a caretaker at an adult education college and I’d seen the woodwork shop. At middle school we did a little practical work, but never quite enough. I assumed that when I got to upper school I’d finally get to make things properly.

But somehow that never happened.

I’m not sure exactly when I realised it, but at some point it dawned on me that most of the making jobs had gone. What remained were increasingly design jobs. I tried to fit into that world, but for some reason it never sat comfortably with me. I didn’t want to sit at a desk designing things. I wanted to make them.

The irony is that I now spend a lot of time writing essays about making, but that was never what drew me in. What interested me was the workshop itself. Materials, tools, problems, and the satisfaction of working directly on real things.

In the end I left school with fairly average grades and drifted around for a while. I did practical things in my spare time and eventually stumbled across framebuilding.

Looking back, I was lucky. I eventually found a trade that allowed me to develop the sort of mastery I had always been searching for. But I often wonder how many people never find that path.

As I’ve watched my own son grow up, that question has become harder to ignore. Not everyone is suited to the same kind of work. Human beings have different gifts, different temperaments, and different ways of understanding the world. Yet we seem to be steadily reducing the number of pathways through which practical intelligence can develop and be recognised.

I was probably twenty years too late. The world that had once produced large numbers of skilled craftspeople was already disappearing. The pathways into practical mastery had become weaker, narrower, and harder to find.

I was lucky. Eventually I found my way in.

But I often wonder how many people never do.

Craft is a process, not an aesthetic

I increasingly think the debate around craft is framed the wrong way entirely. The question should not simply be how to make work more humane within industrial capitalism. We should also ask what kinds of work, production, and organisational logic actually produce human flourishing in the first place.

I do not think the goal should simply be to make an Amazon warehouse a more humane place to work. We should be asking deeper questions than that. What kinds of work allow people to develop mastery, dignity, judgement, and meaningful participation in society? What kinds of production systems resist churn, disposability, overconsumption, and the destruction of the natural world?

This is where I part ways with attempts to make craft merely compatible with modern capitalist production. Craft is not simply an aesthetic layer that can be added back onto industrial logic to make it feel more human. Craft is itself a fundamentally different logic around making.

Looking back, I think what Andrew was trying to teach me was not simply how to shape a lug. He was teaching me how to make judgements in situations where there was no exact formula to follow.

Every stroke of the file carried consequences. Remove too much metal and it could not be put back. Remove too little and the shape was wrong. Success depended not on following a fixed procedure but on continual judgement throughout the process itself.

This is what the designer and craftsman David Pye called the workmanship of risk. In Pye’s words, workmanship of risk is any form of making where the quality of the result is not predetermined but depends on the judgement, dexterity, and care exercised by the maker as the work unfolds.

Pye contrasted this with what he called the workmanship of certainty. Here the outcome is largely resolved beforehand and embedded into tools, machines, jigs, systems, or processes. Once set up correctly, the result can be reproduced repeatedly with relatively little variation.

Neither form of workmanship is inherently superior. Both have their place. But Pye’s distinction helps us see something important. What we call craft has historically lived much closer to the workmanship of risk.

Craft is not outdated. It simply predates capitalist industrial logic entirely.

Much of what we now call craft was once simply how human beings made almost everything. Craft traditions emerged from a world organised more around maintenance, repair, stewardship, local knowledge, and situated judgement than perpetual replacement and scalable abstraction.

Industrial production brought enormous benefits. It increased productivity, lowered costs, and made many important goods more widely available. Once industrialisation began, competitive pressures between firms and nations made it extremely difficult to resist.

Yet the fact that industrial production emerged for understandable reasons does not mean its organisational logic should dominate every aspect of society indefinitely. Some things genuinely benefit from industrial scale. Others may be better served by maintenance, repair, stewardship, and more participatory forms of production.

When people have tried to define what craft is, it has usually been in response to industrial production. Before industrialisation there was far less need to define craft because it was simply how most things were made. A craftsperson did not produce a “craft aesthetic”. They produced an object.

If those objects now appear to share a particular aesthetic, it is because the process itself shaped what they looked like. Imagine telling an ancient basket weaver that you liked the “craft aesthetic” of their basket. They would probably reply, “It’s just a basket. How else would it look?”

Fundamentally, craft is a process, not an aesthetic.

Before industrialisation, workmanship of risk was not a niche alternative, it was simply how humans made things. There was no competing system capable of eliminating situated judgement from production. This is why craft historically referred less to aesthetics and more to skill, capability, judgement, and practical mastery.

Pye did not invent craft, he tried to describe and defend a mode of making that industrial modernity threatened to replace.

If we circumvent workmanship of risk, we circumvent craft itself.

Formation, Repetition, and Mastery

When people look at apprenticeship from the outside, especially if they have never done one themselves, it can be difficult to understand why so many repetitive tasks are necessary. The work can appear mundane, even exploitative. Apprentices spend hours sweeping floors, filing components, roughing out materials, and repeating the same operations again and again.

Of course apprenticeship systems could be exploitative, but that does not mean the repetitive elements were meaningless. If we look at stone carving, apprentices historically performed much of the roughing out work while masters completed the most delicate stages. But is this simply because the master wants to avoid drudgery, or is roughing out itself an essential part of formation?

If we replace the apprentice with a CNC machine, it may initially seem like an improvement. The apprentice no longer has to do the boring work and can instead focus on the “creative” side of stone carving. But this assumes the repetitive work is separate from the development of mastery itself.

The problem becomes clearer if we look at something most people instinctively understand: learning to play the piano. The novice pianist does not begin with Chopin. They begin with scales, exercises, and simple pieces. Nobody suggests bypassing scales because they are repetitive. We understand that fluency in music emerges through years of embodied practice.

The scales are not an obstacle standing between the novice and musicianship. They are part of how musicianship itself is formed.

The same is true of craft. What appears from the outside to be simple drudgery is often how the apprentice learns to see. The stone carver learns how the material feels, sounds, and responds to the chisel. The apprentice is not simply removing material. They are developing perception.

We cannot have master craftspeople without formation any more than we can have musicians without scales. The repetitive work is not separate from mastery. It is one of the ways mastery is formed.

Yet society increasingly recognises this developmental logic in domains associated with elite culture, music, ballet, and martial arts, while treating similar processes in welding, machining, engineering, and other working-class trades as mere drudgery. That is not a neutral distinction. It is a class distinction.

This also raises a deeper question. Where does creative work actually take place?

For many craftspeople, the deepest creative work happens during the making itself. Intelligence emerges through engagement with reality. The material answers back, the process resists, and the maker adapts.

Many important innovations emerged not because someone fully resolved an idea beforehand, but because they thought through making. The workshop has historically been a cognitive environment. Toolmakers, instrument makers, machinists, engineers, and experimental scientists often discovered things through direct engagement with materials and processes.

A craftsperson deals directly with the thing they are making. They do not merely manipulate a virtual representation of it. Reality is always more varied than any model can fully capture, and skilled people become sensitive to variations that others do not even notice.

Modern abstraction increasingly assumes reality should conform to the model. Craft begins from the opposite premise. The model must continually adapt to reality.

Class and the Recognition of Intelligence

The difference is often one of class.

A concert pianist and a highly skilled welder may both undergo decades of repetition, discipline, perceptual training, and embodied formation. Both develop the ability to perceive distinctions invisible to novices. Both acquire forms of judgement that cannot be reduced to simple rules.

Yet one is often recognised as participating in culture while the other is seen as performing labour.

The difference is not cognitive sophistication. It is cultural prestige.

Historically, many working-class people simply did not have the luxury of pursuing their gifts within culturally prestigious domains because they needed to earn a living. That does not mean their abilities within trades and labour were somehow lesser. These people were masters of their respective crafts and their intelligence made civilisation function.

Modern culture readily recognises embodied intelligence when attached to music, dance, or other forms of high culture. Yet similar forms of intelligence often become invisible when embedded in welding, machining, maintenance, or other practical trades.

During one of my oral history interviews, a former engineering worker remembered being taken on a school trip to the Land Rover factory. Looking back, he remembered being fascinated by it. But what stayed with him was something his teacher said as they walked around.

“Right kids, this is where you’ll end up if you don’t study.”

The comment was probably intended as encouragement, but it reveals something important. The factory was full of skilled people doing complex work, yet the children were being taught to see it as a place of failure rather than achievement.

We have not stopped valuing intelligence. We have become selective about where we recognise it.

An experienced welder working on critical pipework is not simply repeating motions. They are perceiving variations that others cannot see. Years of practice have trained their senses to recognise subtle differences in material behaviour, fit, distortion, heat, and failure.

A friend of mine, Ste, works in industrial maintenance. He often jokes that younger technicians increasingly rely on machine diagnostics to identify faults. But when the abstraction fails, they ring him.

Years of situated exposure allow him to recognise subtle patterns, interpret ambiguity, diagnose behavioural anomalies, and anticipate likely failure chains. Often he can identify a problem over the phone simply from a description of symptoms.

This is intelligence.

But because it is tacit, embodied, experiential, and associated with labour, modern culture increasingly struggles to recognise it as intelligence at all.

Industrial Production, Participation, and Cultural Evolution

Industrial production massively increased productive capacity and reduced the cost of many goods, but it also transformed the relationship between human beings, labour, and making.

The logic behind industrial production is scale. Originally this was achieved by embedding craft knowledge into machines and combining it with division of labour. As time went on, many older production methods based on the original crafts were replaced with new materials, technologies, and systems that further reduced costs and increased output.

This is not simply a technical difference. It is a different organisational logic.

Industrial production evolves by progressively reducing uncertainty, externalising judgement, embedding knowledge into systems, and scaling resolved decisions across as many products as possible. Craft evolves differently. It evolves through extending judgement, adapting to new materials, integrating new tools, and deepening situated engagement with reality itself.

Perhaps society increasingly privileges abstract intelligence because abstract cognition is more compatible with industrial production. Industrial systems depend heavily upon abstraction, quantification, repeatability, scalability, and externalised knowledge. Embodied intelligence is harder to standardise, quantify, and scale. That does not make it lesser intelligence. It may simply make it less compatible with industrial logic.

This matters because there is often a claim that technology democratises craft by making participation easier. But easier access to products is not necessarily the same thing as easier access to meaningful participation in making.

In my own craft of framebuilding I increasingly see this confusion. Because pathways into practical formation have weakened, many people now assume the craft itself is impossible without extensive jigs, engineering calculations, digital systems, and expensive tooling.

The irony is that this does not necessarily democratise participation. In many ways it can actually narrow it.

People increasingly assume they need highly technical qualifications in order to participate in making bicycles at all. Yet historically many highly skilled craftspeople entered these trades through apprenticeship, practical immersion, and years of embodied formation rather than academic abstraction.

The problem is not that human beings suddenly became incapable of these things by hand. The problem is that we increasingly no longer build the conditions under which this kind of mastery can form.

This is where plurality becomes important.

One of my concerns with attempts to modernise craft is that they often assume innovation comes primarily from designers, engineers, or technological systems. Yet many craft traditions evolved through a very different process.

They evolved through large numbers of ordinary people participating in making.

Christopher Schwarz makes a similar argument with the humble stick chair. Originally it was practical vernacular furniture. It was not the product of elite designers or formal design education. It emerged because ordinary people adapted available materials to local needs and local constraints.

Yet some stick chairs are extraordinarily beautiful.

The beauty emerged not despite their humble origins but because thousands of people participated in the tradition. Ideas spread between workshops, forms evolved gradually, and small innovations accumulated over generations. The intelligence was distributed.

This is true of many craft traditions. They evolve through large numbers of people making things, solving problems, adapting to material constraints, and learning from one another.

Industrial capitalism tends towards a different logic. It concentrates production, embeds knowledge into systems, and scales resolved decisions across as many products as possible. This can be extraordinarily effective at producing large quantities of goods, but it also reduces the number of people actively participating in making.

The result is that products often survive while the cultures that produced them gradually disappear.

This matters because participation is not merely a way of producing objects. Participation is itself a source of innovation. Craft traditions evolve because many people are engaged in them.

A culture of thousands of chairmakers will often generate richer forms than a handful of designers working on behalf of millions of consumers.

The same is true of brewing, cycling, woodworking, and countless other traditions. Their vitality comes from distributed experimentation rather than centralised control.

Craft traditions stagnate when too few people are still meaningfully participating in them.

The problem today is that industrial production has replaced craft almost everywhere, including in many places where craft logic might still be preferable. What remains is often too marginal, too financially precarious, and too culturally isolated for traditions to evolve naturally.

There are simply not enough people still doing it.

The white plastic garden chair is, in many ways, the perfect industrial object. Cheap at scale, materially uniform, globally repeatable, and optimised for mass manufacture.

The stick chair emerged from a completely different logic. It was cheap not because labour had been minimised, but because materials were local, available, reused, or scavenged. It evolved within a culture of participation rather than a system of mass production.

Industrial production can certainly reproduce the appearance of a stick chair. What it struggles to reproduce are the social and material conditions that generated the stick chair tradition in the first place.

The white plastic garden chair is not evil. In many ways it is a remarkable industrial achievement. It is cheap, durable, lightweight, weather resistant, and can be produced in enormous quantities. For some purposes, that makes perfect sense.

The problem is not that industrial production exists. The problem is that we have increasingly allowed its logic to become the default measure of rationality itself.

The white plastic chair appears rational because it minimises labour, reduces cost, and maximises output. The stick chair appears irrational because it requires skill, time, judgement, and participation in making. Yet this reveals more about our assumptions than it does about the chairs.

The stick chair emerged from a world where materials were scarce, tools were simple, and practical competence was widespread. It was often made from local timber, offcuts, and whatever happened to be available. It evolved through generations of ordinary people working within real material constraints. In many ways it represents a form of ecological intelligence, accumulated not through theory but through practice.

I do not want to live in a world without industrial production. Some things genuinely benefit from industrial scale. But neither do I want to live in a world that considers it rational to produce millions of disposable objects while treating the skills required to make durable and repairable ones as obsolete.

Perhaps we have not left enough space for craft.

Not because craft is nostalgic, but because some things are better made through traditions that value maintenance over replacement, stewardship over disposal, and participation over passive consumption.

The question is not whether industrial production should disappear. The question is whether we have allowed it to crowd out other ways of making that remain valuable, both culturally and ecologically.

That tradition evolved through plurality, participation, local adaptation, material constraint, and countless ordinary people engaged in making.

Craft is not simply a different way of producing objects.

It is a different way of organising human creativity itself.

The Crisis of Practical Intelligence

To me, craft is a form of human expression, one that many of us are intrinsically drawn to and one that has quite literally helped build civilisation.

My concern is that we increasingly organise society around a narrow understanding of intelligence and contribution. We recognise some forms of intelligence readily, particularly those that are abstract, symbolic, and easily measured. Other forms, especially those rooted in practical mastery, maintenance, repair, and embodied judgement, become increasingly invisible.

The result is that many people struggle to find work that aligns with their abilities and temperament. We often speak about skills shortages, disengagement, and a lack of direction among young people. Yet perhaps part of the problem is that we have steadily weakened the pathways into forms of work that once provided purpose, dignity, and mastery for millions.

I often wonder how many people are walking around today feeling the same frustration I felt when I was younger. People who want to work directly with materials, solve practical problems, and make useful things, but who increasingly struggle to find pathways into that world.

Perhaps we have not diminished human capability so much as forgotten how to form it.

When I was filing that lug at the beginning of this piece, I genuinely struggled to see the difference between what I was doing and what Andrew wanted. Looking back, I almost feel as though I stumbled into getting it right by accident.

But somewhere between that day and this one, something changed.

Today I can see the difference instantly. More than that, I don’t really think about it anymore. The file just seems to move to the right place.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened. I can’t point to a lesson, a book, or a particular day when I suddenly understood. All I know is that between then and now I shaped thousands of lugs.

Somewhere inside all those hours, all those mistakes, all those corrections, and all those repetitions, my eyes learnt to see what Andrew could already see.

That is what formation looks like.

And perhaps that is what we increasingly struggle to understand.

When we look at mastery from the outside, we see only the finished capability. We do not see the thousands of ordinary acts that produced it.

We mistake formation for drudgery, apprenticeship for exploitation, and judgement for something that can simply be downloaded into a machine.

But civilisation has always depended on people learning to see in this way.

The real question is whether we are still willing to create the conditions that allow them to do so.