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Liberian Tailoring Apprenticeship
The Vai and Gola tailoring workshops that Lave documented in Liberia in the 1970s — where apprentices learned their craft by pressing trousers for months before touching scissors, in a sequence that revealed the learning sequence and the logical sequence as different things.
Jean Lave's early fieldwork in Liberia, beginning in the late 1960s and extending through the early 1970s, documented the tailoring apprenticeship practices of Vai and Gola masters in Monrovia and surrounding regions. The workshops operated on a principle that Western educational observers found initially perplexing: the newcomer did not begin with fundamentals and proceed by degrees of complexity to the finished garment. He began with finishing operations — pressing completed trousers, sewing on buttons, attaching waistbands — and only gradually, over months and years, moved toward the complex and consequential operations of measuring, cutting, and assembly that constituted the master tailor's core expertise. The sequence was not arbitrary. It had been refined over generations of practice and it encoded, in its structure, a theory of how competence is built.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The apprentice who pressed trousers was not performing meaningless busywork. He was handling