ABSTRACT
Vocationalism refers to the subordination or accommodation of the educational system to the supposed needs of the economic system. In particular, vocationalism depicts a vision of schooling in which the chief function and responsibility of education are to meet the expressed needs of employers for useful skills. Most observers see vocationalism as a historical process, in which the liberal, moral, or civic purposes of schooling are steadily displaced by economic purposes. Analysts of vocationalism are often sharply divided on whether or not this accommodation is a good thing, and much of the literature on vocationalism is quite normative. Hayward (2007: 3), for instance, sees vocationalism negatively, defining it as ‘the over-promotion of the work-related learning aims of secondary and tertiary education at the expense of the civic, aesthetic and moral purposes of education’. Others have defined vocationalism more positively as being of great benefit not only to employers, but to students, job-seekers, workers, and society more broadly. There is no single entity that can be identified as vocationalism. As Ryan (2003: 159)
observed, ‘Vocationalism involves heterogeneous practices and multiple objectives.’ Most importantly, vocationalism is not reducible to vocational education. While a narrowly vocational education comprises a particular aspect of vocationalism, the concept of vocationalism is broader, encompassing a range of practices and policies intended to maximize the occupational value of schooling. Among its staunchest supporters, vocationalism offers young people preparation for vocations – work that is meaningful and purposeful – rather than simply for jobs. In one sense, vocationalism is a social movement. That is, there is an active and poli-
tically organized vocationalist community with its own professional associations, specialized journals, engaged core of advocates, and bureaucratic apparatus. Vocationalism is also an ideology, or at the very least an educational ideal, with its own system of beliefs, folk heroes, and guiding vision of what education should be. The extent to which vocationalism has penetrated an educational system will vary
across societies and historical periods. In principle, if not in practice, a society may organize
its educational system around liberal or general studies with no explicit or even implicit connections to economic production. At the other extreme, virtually all curriculum, credentials, and pedagogy might be directed toward workforce preparation. What characterizes strongly vocationalized educational systems is that schooling is in the end more responsive to the economy than it is an innovative or independent force for the dissemination of other sorts of values and priorities. Vocationalism can refer to educational preparation both for entry-level occupations of
middling skill and income levels and for professional or high-skill positions. My focus here will be on vocationalism in secondary and tertiary schooling. I will not consider elementary education, although elements of vocationalism have penetrated curriculum and pedagogy even at that level. I will also ignore job training, a practice that is explicitly designed to enhance job skills, and which thus lacks the inherent tension between the competing civic or moral and economic purposes of schooling that characterizes other levels of the educational system. Vocationalism typically brings with it the increasing involvement of the business
community in the everyday operation of the educational system. This can take different forms, ranging from active partnerships between school and business through lobbying and otherwise influencing educational and labor force policy through the simple provision of money, equipment, or other resources. While business has rarely been indifferent to the output of the educational system, its direct involvement in schooling is almost certainly greater now than it has ever been. The relationships between business and education can be either consensual or conflictual, but the two institutions are in either case increasingly interconnected.
