ABSTRACT
Modern vocational education emerged because of the economic and social restructuring required by industrialisation and intensified global trade in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Clarke and Winch, 2007; Weber, 1977, pp. 303–338; Sanderson, 1983, pp. 24–32). The gradual demise of the traditional providers of pre-modern vocational education – guilds, artisanship and apprenticeships – the introduction of new techniques, increasing mechanisation, and the expansion of modern methods of production, particularly factory organisation, reflected the dislocation of the workforce, and the increasing distance of the owners, from the processes of production (Gehin, 2007). This decline of the traditional means of technical, craft-based knowledge transmission entailed the creation of a state-sponsored system of labour force formation.
