A new policy for craft training & education for the less able?

One of the themes of Samuel Butler's novel ‘Erewhon’ was that when knowledge becomes experience, it tends to become part of conventional thinking. Experience and repetition tend to dull the edge of the original conclusions, values, and propositional beliefs which gave birth to the experience. Periodically then, we need to scrutinise again what we are doing, and why we are doing it in a particular way. Hence the following article is not offered as series of critical reviews, or prescriptions for action, but as an invitation to readers to explore some of the assumptions and learner characteristics on which craft training and education is currently based, and to generate some possible options and guide lines for future policy.