Overview
This essay discusses the renewal of apprenticeship for high school-aged youth. The author enumerates and illustrates the attributes of this distinctive institution and explores its developmental benefits that complement the period of adolescence. Benefits gained by participants are included.
In a recent commentary entitled “Let Teenagers Try Adulthood,” Bard College president Leon Botstein (1999) argues that most high schools in the United States serve most of their students poorly, failing equally to engage their minds and hearts and to help them begin to prepare for adult life. Although Botstein’s (1999) commentary is focused on the lack fit between high school as an institution and young people’s developmental needs, it applies equally to the culture at large. Too many young people in American society lack access to the kinds of vital, productive learning experiences that would enrich their present lives and provide a foundation for adulthood (Eccles 2004). Adults worry...
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Acknowledgments
This essay is drawn from the author’s book The Means to Grow Up: Reinventing Apprenticeship as a Developmental Support in Adolescence (Routledge 2009).
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Halpern, R. (2011). Apprenticeships. In: Levesque, R.J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_222
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