[Taxacom] scholarly apprentices? willing workers in natural history museums?

[Frederick W Schueler]

Colleagues,

Serious academic apprenticeship, outside the university system, is 
something that would work in a society in which it was prevalent, but 
our experience is that it doesn't work in contemporary North America, at 
least among the populations from which we've tried to recruit. See 
http://www.pinicola.ca/apprent.htm -- which has been nominated as the 
world's least productive webpage.

Modern home-schoolers tend not to leave home to study and work, while 
scholarly sorts tend to be entrained in the school system, and to do 
well enough there that they don't look for alternatives. As an 
independent scholarly household, we've signed up for numerous intern and 
apprenticeship programmes with diverse organizations, but have never had 
a student actually make it to our doors under their auspices.

Organic farms have their "willing worker" websites http://www.wwoof.ca/ 
and our daughter has had generous responses to a notice about us that 
she put up on an au pair website where she's been registered.

So my question is: Is there a website that gets potential natural 
history apprentices and mentors together outside the university system?

We're thinking of something like the organic farms "willing workers" 
arrangement, where the visitor/apprentice exchanges specialized and 
generalized work for room & board, instruction and exposure to a novel 
bio-region, though we'd expect a somewhat longer residence time than the 
organic farms require.

fred.
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             Bishops Mills Natural History Centre
           Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
        RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
     on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
       (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca
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