European Background.

Children, both girls and boys, generally began their occupational education within the household of their birth. Most would remain there, being taught farming or housewifery as they grew to adulthood. Others, however, lived with relatives or friends and essentially acquired much of the same occupational instruction. A legal and contractual arrangement for occupational training, apprenticeship emerged from the European craft and trade guilds of the Middle Ages. In the apprenticeship system boys, usually between ten and fourteen years old, were trained under the supervision of a master craftsman or merchant in a particular trade or profession for several years, most often until they were twenty-one. Many guilds required that the apprentice's parents pay the master a fee for his services. Through apprenticeship the guilds regulated entry into the trades, maintained skill levels, and secured cheap labor for the masters. Under...