adult apprentice Available to Purchase

THROUGHOUT THE WESTERN WORLD, THE ACQUISITION OF A high‐level manual skill is regarded mainly as the prerogative of youth. This is a view which has been adhered to most vehemently by this country; elsewhere the situation is more elastic, as Gertrude Williams shows in her book APPRENTICESHIP IN EUROPE. In this book she describes a survey of the apprenticeship systems of seven West European countries and comments that in every one of these countries ‘apprenticeship is very much shorter than here’ and also, ‘in no country is there any restriction, such as exists in this country on the maximum age of entry into apprenticeship imposed either by law or by the trade unions’. Despite this flexibility, Lady Williams found that there was ‘little demand from older people for apprenticeship vacancies for they can rarely afford … adolescent wages’.