Draws on data from several years of ethnographic fieldwork with Mayan midwives in Mexico to account for the general failure of government-sponsored training courses designed to upgrade the skills of indigenous midwives. The primary reason for this failure is ascribed to the fundamentally different means of knowledge acquisition involved: the didactic mode of formal teaching that is used in Western-style training vs the experiential mode of apprenticeship learning to which the midwives are accustomed.