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The Provision of Vocational Education

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Vocational Education

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Abstract

This chapter discusses what constitutes the provision of vocational education, how it is implemented and what is learnt from and through it is fundamentally shaped by decision-making of different kinds and by individuals and institutions positioned differently within and outside this field of education. To elaborate on this decision-making and its implications for a consideration of vocational education, this chapter utilises the three conceptions of curriculum introduced in the previous chapter: the intended, enacted and experienced curriculum. Through a discussion of the scope of each of these concepts and a consideration of decision-making that occurs within it, the curriculum processes underpinning vocational education and explanatory accounts of the provision of vocational education are advanced. So, having considered definitions and orientations of curriculum it is now appropriate to consider decision-making as a defining part of the curriculum process and also the provision of vocational education. These considerations are advanced through this chapter by considering in turn the intended, enacted and experienced curriculum.

… a right educational use of it (vocational education) would react upon intelligence and interest so as to modify, in connection with legislation and administration, the socially obnoxious features of the present industrial and commercial order. It would turn the increasing kind of social sympathy to constructive account, instead of leaving it a somewhat blind philanthropic sentiment. It would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and ability to share in the social control, and ability to become masters of their industrial fate. It would enable them to saturate with meaning the technical and mechanical features which are so marked a feature of our machine system of production and distribution.

(Dewey, 1916, p. 320)

… the work we have to do in the field of adult education is the work that all forms of education should be united in performing. The main purpose of the education process is not mastering of particular disciplines or particular techniques. This is subsidiary. Its function is to make open to all the whole of our inheritance. It is to enable people to see the meanness of the city and the city itself. It must breed constructive scepticism and belief at one and the same time. It must serve the practical enactment of developing knowledge which leads to control. Education cannot rest upon particular interpretations of life or have preserved activities into which only the few can enter. Education must be for everyman and its fundamental aim must be to enable everyman to enrich the common life, to add what it is in him to add to the common stock.

(cited as seen World Association for Adult Education, 1931, p. 124)

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  1. Griffith University, School of Education and Professional Studies, Mount Gravatt Campus, 4111, Griffith, Queensland, Australia

    Stephen Billett

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Correspondence to Stephen Billett .

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Billett, S. (2011). The Provision of Vocational Education. In: Vocational Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1954-5_8

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