Valuing Prior Learning

Since time immemorial, learning has consisted of ‘learning by falling and getting up again.’
But as a distribution of labour arose, so too arose the need to institutionalize learning and
working in a system of professional training, because increasing job and profession differentiation
required learning specific skills to be able to function in a given profession.
A good example of an approach that is both structured and based on a single professional
“column” (the series of positions on the mobility track in the profession) is the guild
system of the Middle Ages, in which employers dominated with a view to labour market
regulation and protection. The subsequent trades system brought little change, although
an early form of knowledge infrastructure was built up via social-charitable leerwerkscholen
(work-study schools). With national legislation in 1919, the industrial society developed
the knowledge infrastructure into a system with a great deal of responsibility on the
part of the government and social partners. Increasingly, the system was the central focus,
with certification within the professional column as the goal. The Secondary Education
Act actually took the first steps towards the VPL-era knowledge economy; from that time
on, ‘continued learning’ had a general perspective, and was no longer dictated by purely
economic interests.
In the Middle Ages, there was no system of national education. The economy was characterised
by feudal relationships and traditional production. Training in a craft was organised
under the guild system. This system dominated the urban economy until deep into
the eighteenth century. Education was a private initiative involving cooperation with local
authorities (Israel, 1997). It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the guilds
were abolished, to make way for a more open economic system with freedom of establishment
and without impediments to professional practice.
A wide range of professions, including merchants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, professions
and cartwrights, were organized into guilds. The guilds in a city were organised by
professional groups. Along with practicing the profession and certain civil obligations,
they conducted their own educational practice, focused on knowledge transfer and,
more importantly, the regulation of the labour market for the guild’s specific profession.
Teaching the required professional skills was a part of maintaining the guild’s monopoly.
This monopoly was forcibly maintained, including in the recruitment of apprentices. Only
after obtaining the permission of the guild could a craftsman take on an apprentice. The
apprentices, or the parents, usually “bought themselves in,” by payment of an apprenticeship
fee, with a member of the guild, so long as the guild granted its permission to do so.
The amount of the apprenticeship fee included the calculation of the use that the master
expected to have from the apprentice during the period of apprenticeship (Griffiths, 1981).
Regulation of the tempo in which an apprentice can develop into a master via practical
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