“Creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice.”
At Harmel, work is not preparation for the trade — it is the trade, from the first week. Men spend roughly half their time in the shop and half on a job site or a shop floor, learning welding, machining, carpentry, electrical and the rest of the skilled trades by practicing them.
Our learning labs are designed to mimic real-world environments so that our students can spend as much time as possible “getting their hands dirty.” Those labs are not an abstraction. In year one, a man works through automotive and small engine repair, carpentry and construction, electrical, plumbing and HVAC, machining and machine building, CAD and additive manufacturing, and welding — enough ground covered in a year to find out where his hands belong.
In his second year he narrows: machinist, machine builder and millwright, tool and die moldmaker, electrician, builder, or welder. From that point the lab work is the related technical instruction his apprenticeship requires.
Harmel men learn to work by actually working, not just talking about it. We guide our students through this in one of two ways: by helping the men win apprenticeship placements in a local collaborating shop, or by placing them in what we call a “meanwhile job” while they wait for an apprenticeship position to open.
An apprentice typically spends two days a week on campus earning related technical instruction hours and three days in the field earning on-the-job hours — and a paycheck. Those hours count toward a journeyman’s card, the credential issued by state and national governing bodies that lets a tradesman practise his craft at an authoritative level.
As it should be, the money earned in his work is the man’s to spend as he sees fit. Because the man’s job is ultimately his to win, lose, or thrive in, the Harmel man learns from the get-go how to respond to life’s opportunities, how to captain his own ship and to manage the many relationships and responsibilities required to be excellent. All along the way, however, Harmel staff and faculty serve as close advisors to ensure the man develops and refines the technical skills and virtuous character that prepare him for this excellence.
“Harmel has a very unique way of focusing on why we’re working, Who we’re actually working for, and why working with your hands is so satisfying and joyful. We’ve been able to practice actually finding God in our work.”
Harmel men live in households — small groups of different years and trades who share meals, leisure and the daily work of holding one another to holiness.
Ora et labora: men pray Lauds, Vespers and Compline together daily, learning from St. Joseph that prayer is not a break from work but the soul of it.
Work is good in itself — a share in God's own making of the world — so a man's trade here forms him as surely as it pays him.
Great books read in a monastic key rather than an academic one, where a welder reading Flannery O'Connor is not taking a break from welding.
