Liberal Vocationalism – an idea still waiting its time

I live in near-constant despair at the paucity of thinking around training and skills, and vocational education in the UK where no-one seems to have a vision that fits with the world as we are coming to know it, as opposed to the world we look back upon.  Equally poor, perhaps, is the contentment of many providers with low level (e.g. Level 2) qualifications as opposed to something more challenging and worthwhile.  The following is a reminder of what might be possible, and is taken from: Sustainability, Learning and Capability: Exploring Questions of Balance. Sustainability, 2, 3735-3746 which Steve Gough and I published back in 2010.

In 1983, Stephen Kemmis published a rather obscure paper that set out in simple form an idea that was afterwards very influential in the formation of ideas about environmental education and, subsequently, education for sustainable development. There are, he argued, three alternative views of education. The first of these he termed the ‘job-slots’ view. According to this, education exists to service the labour market. It is essentially a mechanism for social and economic reproduction. Kemmis argued (in a way which resonates strongly in the present) that such a view was not only impoverished, but also doomed to failure since it leaves no room for the adaptiveness required by both economy and education in the face of change.

The second alternative, according to Kemmis, was the ‘cultured persons and survivors’ view—broadly recognizable as a traditional liberal perspective—that aimed to produce self-motivated, independent, responsible, tolerant and able individuals. This Kemmis rejected on the grounds that it intrinsically failed to address, and in fact buttressed, the inequalities and injustices of capitalist society, notwithstanding frequent and no doubt well-meant attempts by its advocates to promote fairness and inclusion.

Finally, Kemmis identified the ‘members of society’ view of education, which aimed to facilitate social transformation through social critique and collaborative action. This view, powerfully underpinned by socially-critical theory, and with a commitment to action research that attracted many educators, was to have the strongest influence in the development, over the next twenty-five years or so, of environmental education and then education for sustainable development. We have argued elsewhere that this socially-critical approach was, in fact, ultimately self-contradictory, since it insisted on individual and social self-determination while at the same time prescribing what the outcomes of that process must be. It was, in fact, an advocacy of Berlin’s kind of ‘positive freedom’.  See Gough (2010) for a fuller discussion of this issue in the context of TVET.

The view we take here is broadly consistent with Christopher Winch’s recent conception of ‘liberal vocationalism’, which has been developed with particular reference to TVET:

Liberal vocationalism builds on the recognition, which has steadily gained ground since the discrediting of theories of unitary ability, that ability is actively specific and that abilities vary widely and are related to interests. It recognizes and celebrates the diversity of human life and aspirations. It also fulfils many of the main criteria of a liberal education: it initiates young people into worthwhile activities, building on cognitive breadth it seeks to provide cognitive depth in certain areas and it emphasises choice and forms of learning that are ethically acceptable. It parts company with traditional liberalism in putting limits on the depth to which ‘forms of knowledge’ are pursued and substitutes in their place more practical modes of knowledge.

This, we would argue, is consistent with a conception of sustainable development that is both internally robust, and a credible basis for ongoing negotiation and re-negotiation in modern societies. Perhaps most particularly, the liberal vocationalist insistence on a conception of what is ‘worthwhile’ opens the door to sustainability by inviting the reestablishment of the linkage between vocational education and (full, active) citizenship.  ...