It’s
Time To End The Old Distinction Between Vocational And Academic
Education
By Jerry F.
Cammarata, Ph.D.
& Jerrold Ross, Ph.D.
Once
upon a time, we could make a distinction between “educating
for making a living” and “education for life.”
The
liberal arts and the humanities—education for life—helped
us live our lives well and decently. Liberal studies also trained
our minds to think creatively and imaginatively. A liberal
arts education was meant to train us in critical thinking.
They were an exercise in seeing patterns, in understanding
the different ways of looking at the same event, or in grasping
the creative possibilities broadened by the very strictures
that might seem to limit them.
Education for
making a living, on the other hand, was what used to be called
the commercial arts, the technical arts, a curriculum designed
to help us find the kinds of jobs that often put a value on
adherence to limits rather than the ability to manipulate or
transcend them.
Today,
it is often said that we live in the “information age” and
people are “information workers.” Perhaps it would
be better to say that our information economy has blurred the
old definitions of thinker and doer, creating everyone anew
as manager, entrepreneur, and creative decision maker. Today,
people are expected to have the flexibility to take on a multitude
of tasks, to approach unforeseen exigencies with clever solutions,
and to constantly improve the product; in short, to be information
workers.
A
recipe for disaster: we hear a renewed call for “career-oriented” curricula
in high schools. The National Association of Scholars recently
issued a proposal for reforming secondary education that would
ask entering ninth-graders to select one of two tracks of study:
a “subject-centered” curriculum (similar to the
college prep courses of old) and a “career-oriented” curriculum
(similar to the old commercial course or vocational education
but reflecting jobs generated by the new technology). It is
a recipe for disaster for our economy, our national culture,
and our students’ futures.
As
the pace of technological change accelerates, the very jobs
at which such specific training is aimed will be disappearing
as well—those
of us who are still struggling with our VCR’s have felt
the breeze of DVDs, DVRs, and podcasting passing us by. We
may soon well be receiving three-dimensional interactive entertainment
via chips implanted directly in our brains.
This applies
not only to the technical careers, but to business as well.
TiVo and similar services are about to render obsolete the
traditional advertising executive, and the New York Stock Exchange
trading floor may well be housed entirely on a CPU chip within
our lifetimes.
History repeating: recall that the very notion of vocational education
has its roots in the early part of the 20th century, when
the “line jobs” meant assembly lines. In Left
Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, the highly regarded scholar Diane Ravitch noted
that, around the time of World War I, education reformers
decided an academic curriculum for all students was not “socially
efficient.”
And
so was born the junior high school—or intermediate school, or
middle school—where youngsters would be guided into a
track based on evaluations made possible by the burgeoning
science of intelligence testing. At about age 13, students
decided, or had decided for them, whether they were college
and professional material, or whether they belonged in manual
labor.
A new vocational education: the skills needed today are, in fact, precisely
not the ones acquired by this sort of consignment to a myopic,
preemployment education, but those acquired through the challenges
of a broad, liberal arts curriculum: the ability to focus
on detail, yet also comprehend the whole; the intellectual
curiosity to ask not just “how” and “what” but “why” things
can’t be different from they way they are; the perspicacity
to see other possibilities of interaction between discipline,
industries, or departments; the creativity to draw n seemingly
irrelevant analogies to better understand apparent conundrums;
the flexibility and open-mindedness to try new things, whether
professionally or personally, or as Ernst Boyer stated in Scholarship
revisited, to “…interpret,
draw together, and bring new insight to bear…on ideas.”
A
friend of ours told us about a talk given recently at an
alumni dinner for a Jesuit high school. “The Jesuits taught us Latin
and literature, calculus and chemistry, philosophy and pure
physics,” he said, “They trained us for nothing
but prepared us for anything.”
That’s
the kind of vocational education we need now. That’s
the kind of education we need for living and for life.#
Jerry
Cammarata is a former member of the NYC Board of Education
and a former NYC Commissioner of Youth and Community Development.
Jerrold Ross is dean at the school of Education at St.
John’s
University, Queens, New York.
