ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the reform proposals for contemporary vocational education. In the democratic vision of a post-Fordist workplace, skilled workers are rewarded for acquiring knowledge and skills related to the functioning of the larger operation. The democratic post-Fordist learning organization cultivates employees' abilities to identify and solve problems. Acting on the information and insight workers provide, post-Fordist learning organizations come to regard worker skills and knowledge as the most important dynamic of economic production. The chapter reviews one-hundred-year debate over perceiving work preparation as vocational training or as vocational education. It explores the five traditional emphases of vocational education. The chapter analyzes Marsha Rehm's three positions in order to contextualize the latest expression of a democratic progressive form of vocational education—a critical pedagogy of vocationalism. The fourth perspective on vocational education is not simply instrumental, as it provides students with knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to both understand and participate in the political dynamics of the changing workplace.
