The modern journeyman: influences and controls of apprentice style learning in culinary education

Abstract

This thesis examines the shift from traditional on-site industry education (apprentice style learning) to tertiary education in academically-centred institutions, with particular emphasis on professional culinary education. With the deceptively seamless transition of numerous crafts and trades from their traditional apprentice/journeyman training and education schemes, into the tertiary education sector - from the late 1960s up until today - a crack had been created in the education process. The government had acknowledged that the possible 'confusion' and 'drop back' in traditional training schemes and apprenticeships had, to some extent, been a case of confusion or misinterpretation on the part of trade and industry and new trainees. Particularly, when the general comprehension of the 'newly' altered Education Act, New Apprenticeship Act and government-promoted shift of autonomous industry bodies to a centralised State controlled system had been largely ineffective, there was an observable decline in the traditionally mentored and educated crafts and trades. The investigation extends beyond the recent 'symptoms' of changing government Acts, extensively developing (global) tertiary education and evolving industry education responsibility to explore the deeper influences and controls of change which have brought us to where we are today. This exploration will cover a diversity of education history, government policy, industry renovation and significant world events which have changed the path of the modern journeyman and professional craft and trade education. Within the New Zealand context, little research has been found or published on this particularly involved theme [the Modern Journeyman and professional culinary education], which, by its absence has contributed to a wide chasm of unanswered enquiries and uncertainties, which now needs to be investigated. This treatise explores three key areas of 'power and control' within the arenas of politics, education and industry education. These are considered through the multi-perspective lenses of critical social science, existentialism and postmodernism. Specific attention is paid to the practical aspects of the evolving (culinary) Journeyman and the seemingly repetitive patterns of 'power and control' that have emerged from the multifarious disciplines and time-frames. Throughout the development of Western European education and the advancement of craft and trade (knowledge and practices), there has been a question of value, ownership and 'privilege' attached to who, how, where and what can be taught and learnt. And in many cases the State has either stepped in to regulate the process - as a matter of civil duty, or has taken over the process - as a form of social and ideological control. In the case of the Culinary Journeyman, the New Zealand tertiary system and the shifting authorities of professional knowledge and practice, the price which may eventually be extracted for the targeted control of education practice (mentored/apprenticed learning) and professional knowledge development, may be more than the cost of an admission to a professional tertiary cookery course in the future.