ABSTRACT
The programmatic divergence in the vocational education of whites and nonwhites in American schools clearly indicates a race and class-based stratification of students. Minority and poor students are advised as early as junior high to adjust their curriculum for low-level occupations. They are removed from their high-school classes for work-site training and, perceiving that they possess marketable skills, leave school early. Critical vocational educators are haunted by and obsessed with questions of how social, political, and economic power works to undermine the educational progress and economic mobility of nonwhite and poor students. All young people are coming of age in an unfair economy where bad work is proliferating and high-skill post-Fordist core jobs are contracting. A critical pedagogy of vocational education refuses the blindness, focusing its efforts not on some facile romanticization of young people but on a concerted attempt to understand the issues involved with being young in the 1990s.
