Generally, apprenticeships should have planned obsolescence. A pattern I’ve seen in myself and others: A student takes a teacher. They’re submissive, in a certain sense—not giving up agency, or harming themselves, or following arbitrarily costly orders, or being overcredulous; but rather, a narrow purely cognition-allocating version of assuming a low-status stance: deferring to local directions of attention by the teacher, provisionally accepting some assumptions, taking a stance of trying to help the teacher with the teacher’s work. This is good because it enhances the bandwidth and depth of transmission of tacit knowledge from the teacher.
But, for many students, it shouldn’t be the endpoint of their development. At some point they should be questioning all assumptions, directing their attention and motivation on all levels, being the servant of their own plans. When this is delayed, e.g. the teacher or the student or something else is keeping the student within a fixed submissive role, the student is stunted, bitter, wasted, restless, jerked around, stagnant. In addition to lines of retreat from social roles, have lines of developmental fundamental change.
Generally, apprenticeships should have planned obsolescence. A pattern I’ve seen in myself and others: A student takes a teacher. They’re submissive, in a certain sense—not giving up agency, or harming themselves, or following arbitrarily costly orders, or being overcredulous; but rather, a narrow purely cognition-allocating version of assuming a low-status stance: deferring to local directions of attention by the teacher, provisionally accepting some assumptions, taking a stance of trying to help the teacher with the teacher’s work. This is good because it enhances the bandwidth and depth of transmission of tacit knowledge from the teacher.
But, for many students, it shouldn’t be the endpoint of their development. At some point they should be questioning all assumptions, directing their attention and motivation on all levels, being the servant of their own plans. When this is delayed, e.g. the teacher or the student or something else is keeping the student within a fixed submissive role, the student is stunted, bitter, wasted, restless, jerked around, stagnant. In addition to lines of retreat from social roles, have lines of developmental fundamental change.