ABSTRACT
If you’re old enough you’re likely to think of vocational education by conjuring up now retro images of shop class greasers, or recovering dim memories of those invidious secondary school tracking mechanisms that doubtless separated most of “us,” as fastracked toward college, from “the others” who went-well, who went somewhere else eventually. Of course voc ed has changed over the years, and if you’re at all familiar with a wide range of recent initiatives you may instead find yourself thinking of all the current political rhetoric regarding promises of high tech training for everyone for the 21st century. But either way, voc ed seems an unlikely place to explore the obvious themes of this chapter around issues of value, both aesthetic and economic. That is, whether your images of voc ed involve something like metal lathe training, or more currently CNC routing or systems programming, voc ed clearly has to do with work and with money, but not exactly with aesthetics. Nevertheless, for some time versions of voc ed training have trafficked everyday in the most mundane, ordinary forms of direct exchange between beauty and money. There are, for example, well over half a million licensed cosmetologists in the U.S. today, most of whom are women-producing beauty primarily for other women in exchange for relatively small sums of money many times over in the course of a working day. Cosmetology in other words is about beauty and about money and about education, education that is strictly controlled by State licensing procedures.
