A Liberal Vocationalism

John Brennan, Harold Silver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780416092622
• eBook ISBN: 9781135836658
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Aims to rescue a usable interpretation of the vocational theory in higher education by describing the historical and policy frameworks of the debate.

Part One: FRAMEWORKS

1: Confuse or clarify?

‘If it’s easy to start an argument about transport’, commented the Duke of Edinburgh in 1961, ‘it is just as easy to start a riot about education and training’ (Edinburgh 1962:293). Wherever the entry is made into such educational vocabularies, the riot follows. Education and training, theory and practice, the liberal and the vocational—the polarities have centuries of turbulent history, mounting as the concepts and the processes have become explicit elements in social and economic pressures and conflicts. The focus of this book is on the vocational and, as Margaret Thatcher underlined, as opposition spokesman on education in 1970, when she wrote about the fledgling polytechnics: ‘they have tended to provide training for specific jobs; in modern jargon (which often seems to confuse rather than clarify) the courses are vocationally motivated’ (Thatcher 1970:16). The aim of the book is to rescue a usable interpretation of the vocational.

Confusion is not eliminated by definition, or bypassed with negatives. What the vocational is has no stable meaning, and it cannot be established by simply listing the things it is not. The elements of social processes exist only in relationships, and the discussion here can focus on the vocational only by adventuring into the relationships in which it is held. From Aristotle to modern technological policy-making the ‘liberal’ and the ‘vocational’ have been in tension—though through most of that history it is the voices of the liberal that have been most heard. One of the purposes of this book is to hear and to interpret the sounds of institutions, courses of study, and teachers now commonly perceived as vocational—to listen to other voices.

How deep the confusion surrounding the vocational and the liberal has been in this century can be best illustrated from Monroe’s A Cyclopedia of Education published in the United States in 1914. In it John Dewey wrote a piece on ‘Liberal Education’, outlining its trajectory from Aristotle’s definition as associated with knowledge in the context of leisure and the cultivation of mind by a leisured class freed from the preoccupation with practical matters of slaves, serfs, mechanics, or tradesmen. The distinction was between a liberal education as an end in itself, and professional training as a means for practical ends ‘beyond itself. Dewey emphasizes the basis of the distinction between liberal and servile education in Greek class distinction, and the complexities later introduced by the rise of natural science, and the claims of vernacular languages, literature, history, and other disciplines. In a society which bases its constitution on class distinctions it is ‘comparatively easy to assign a distinct content and a distinct purpose to liberal education’, but modern changes—including ‘the democratic ideal’—make that increasingly difficult:

Liberal education becomes a name for the sort of education that every member of the community should have: the education that will liberate his capacities and thereby contribute both to his own happiness and his social usefulness…. In short a liberal education is one that liberalizes. Theoretically any type of education may do this. As matter of fact, all of them fall much short of accomplishing it.

(Dewey 1914:4–6)

Just as any type of education may liberalize, so any may be illiberal if it is excessively narrow and restricts the imagination.

In the search for clarity one then turns to the brief editorial entry under ‘Vocational Education’, which begins:

In a certain sense, all education is vocational in that it aims to prepare one for the more efficient and satisfactory performance of the activities of life. Even liberal education is in a sense vocational, for in its various forms it has aimed to prepare for the life or calling or ‘vocation’ of a statesman or man of public affairs, of the gentleman, of an ecclesiastic, or whatever the particular social concept of the liberally educated man may have taken.

In ‘ordinary usage’, however, vocational education is differentiated from ‘the more general stages’ of education by being chiefly concerned with ‘the practical application of knowledge acquired in early stages of the educational process and the education of selected or differentiated groups. The reader is therefore directed to other encyclopedia entries under Theological Education’, ‘Technical Education’, ‘Agricultural Education’, ‘Teachers, Training of, and so on. The brief discussion ends by underlining the fact that ‘the vocational aspect of education is becoming a topic of very general importance, and is discussed in its theoretical aspects, in addition to the above topics, in the articles on Education; Art in Education; Citizenship and Education’ (Monroe 1914:740). It is unlikely that the search for clarity would end with Dewey’s assertion that any education may be liberal or illiberal, set alongside the view that ‘in a certain sense, all education is vocational’. Across the two interpretations the analysis relates to social structures, subject content, happiness, social usefulness, stages of education, preparation for professions, the application of knowledge, theories, and ordinary usages. It is not only modern jargon which may confuse rather than clarify.

We are concerned in this book predominantly with the nature of the vocational as it is perceived in, and in relation to, higher education. Another set of relationships is implied by such a focus—including the relationships with social structures, social processes, and the economy that have become increasingly close and intricate internationally in recent decades, but also relationships with other levels of education. The exploration of the vocational in higher education relates on the one hand to industry, manpower, social service, and the professions, but also on the other hand to secondary schools, full-time and part-time educational opportunities beyond the secondary school, access, and inservice and continuing education. Focusing here on how the vocational is perceived in relation to undergraduate education, the discussion is continuing a prolonged historical debate about the purposes of such an education, and echoes of that debate. The participants in that debate have always, however, had to have in mind—with one degree or another of explicitness—the total process of producing the ‘educated person’, including the assumptions that can be made about prior learning experience, and what can be assumed about later learning. The curriculum of the secondary school, and its appropriateness for what society conceives to be desirable goals for this stage of education; the existence of postgraduate routes into the professions and therefore the opportunity to delay certain subject content or specialization; the existence and nature of apprenticeship; ‘second-chance’ entry into the educational process: these and other features of the total educational picture are not ultimately separable from a discussion of undergraduate education. It is a question here of focus, and of the specific directions in which illumination is being sought.

The point of entry into the discussion of vocationalism in higher education is therefore the undergraduate course of study, and in some of the investigation conducted here two limitations have been placed on the field. The first has been to look mainly, but not exclusively, at engineering and business studies as exemplars of the areas of study which have been most labelled or discussed in terms of vocationalism (though in different ways and with different chronologies). The second has been to focus on the ‘public sector’ of higher education in Britain—though with a strong interest in associated international developments. The public sector—as the polytechnics and colleges and institutes of higher education in England and Wales, and the central institutions and colleges in Scotland came to be called—grew out of, and were identified with, local authority traditions. For England and Wales the 1987 White Paper Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge rightly pointed to the misnomer, since university funding was equally ‘public’, and it referred instead to the ‘polytechnics and colleges sector’. The public sector, as it is still most commonly termed, however, has been specifically identified with vocationalism in higher education since the late 1960s, and probing its meaning and implications in the public sector has been a means of exploring a difficult and often passionate public debate at its most self-conscious and explicit. In broad terms the public sector has often been seen to have what the Americans call a ‘mission’. That part of it which from the 1960s was validated by the Council for National Academic Awards has had to define its institutional and curriculum purposes in public ways not familiar in the university sector. The national peer-review system developed initially by the National Council for Technological Awards from the mid-1950s, and then by the CNAA from 1964, led to documented and accessible views about course intentions and procedures, debate and judgement about course content and purposes, the review of experience within institutions, and comparative analysis across institutions and within subject areas and disciplines. The ‘new higher education’ in the landscape has been a way into vocationalism in relation to policy and practice in a period when the vocabulary of vocationalism has become more widespread and more strident. It has been, again, a question of finding a focus which makes the currents of debate most visible.

As the references to the Monroe encyclopedia illustrate, the elements of the debate are neither insular nor new. The nature of ‘a liberal education’ for ‘the liberal professions’ has been one important historical thread, and the growing accountability (suasive as well as structural or financial) of higher education for its service and economic roles has relentlessly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries confronted the defensiveness of the traditional liberal educator with the demands of the scientific, the technological, the professional, and the economic. T.H.Huxley, in a discussion of technical education in 1877, was anxious to set technical skills alongside other ends not to be forgotten, including ‘the end of civil existence, I mean a stable social state without which all other measures are merely futile, and, in effect, modes of going faster to ruin’ (Huxley 1899:430). The converse of this mode of going faster to ruin was, of course, the failure to develop science, technology, and other modern studies adequately to ensure economic survival, and the pressures were therefore increasingly strong in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century to incorporate such studies into the university curriculum, or to develop appropriate parallel institutions. These competing demands on the curricula of higher education and on the very conception of a university or college were presented differently, and had different outcomes, in Europe and the United States, and the tensions and accommodations involved have different national resonances. In the resolution of the conflicts that took shape different hierarchies of values were established in the different countries, and cultural and social traditions weighed differently in determining the status of subjects, institutions, and graduate employments.

In Britain, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw accommodations with mathematics and science, but with enormous ambiguities about industry-related and professional studies laying claim to a place in university provision from the late nineteenth century. In a famous passage of an inaugural address at St Andrews in 1867, John Stuart Mill laid down guidelines that were to be followed widely in thinking about university education. The university, in his stentorian phrases, had a proper and well-understood function:

It is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.

(Mill 1867:4)

There was good reason to have schools of law, or engineering, or the industrial arts, but separate from—although perhaps in the same locality as and under the general superintendence of—‘the establishments devoted to education properly so called’ (our italics). The hierarchies of knowledge and institutions are here clearly delineated, and the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of conceptions of culture are equally clear:

What professional men should carry away with them from an University, is not professional knowledge, but that which should direct the use of their professional knowledge, and bring the light of general culture to illuminate the technicalities of a special pursuit.

(Mill 1867:5)

The professional—that is, the new professional—claimants to university positions faced the dual obstacle in late nineteenthcentury Britain of having neither easy access to the universities, nor high-status specialized institutions of the kind that had become common in France, Germany, and other European countries. In the second half of the century the new university colleges, the University of London, the Scottish universities, the newly created polytechnic institutions, were available for such purposes to varied extents, but there was a dominant set of ‘liberal values’ which continued to determine the conditions on which the professional and the technological were admitted, and the resistance which continued to operate.

An important contextual statement of the position for the discussion here was the equally famous analysis that Cardinal John Henry Newman offered in the 1850s. Newman’s view was in one important respect almost identical with Mill’s—professional or scientific knowledge was not a ‘sufficient end of a University Education’. Newman was not hostile to either, and accepted that a university could teach specific branches of knowledge, but there was an important distinction to be made between the teaching of law, medicine, geology, or political economy inside and outside a university. Outside a university, there was a danger of narrowness, of giving lectures ‘which are the Lectures of nothing more than a lawyer, physician, geologist, or political economist’. In a university, on the other hand, a comparable lecturer

will just know where he and his science stand, he has come to it, as it were, from a height, he has taken a survey of all knowledge, he is kept from extravagance by the very rivalry of other studies, he has gained from them a special illumination and largeness of mind and freedom and self-possession.

(Newman 1852, 1943 edn: 104–6)

Newman’s entire argument rests on the identity of a liberal education as pointing to these last-named qualities, the worth of knowledge in itself, irrespective of results: ‘not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves or children’. A liberal education, in this view, is ‘useful’—Newman explicates the concept at length—in that it is an instrument of good. The cultivated intellect was ‘in a true and high sense…useful to the possessor and to all around him; not useful in any low, mechanical, mercantile sense, but as diffusing good, or as a blessing, or a gift, or power, or a treasure’. The whole position Newman adopts, and one which was to remain at the heart of twentieth-century discussions about higher education, is contained in one simple statement: ‘I am prepared to maintain that there is a knowledge worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for what it does’ (Newman 1852, 1943 edn: 157– 60). The distinction between is and does, the different senses of ‘useful’, the in and out of the university, the concept of what is ‘sufficient’ or ‘special’—all of these are echoed in the modern debates and practices.

The relationship between the ‘cultural’ and ‘professional’ purposes and processes of higher education has been subjected to long nineteenth- and twentieth-century debate in the United States. From the mid-nineteenth century, but particularly from the turn of the twentieth century, Americans have had a major preoccupation with the nature and purposes of a college or university education. The nature of the college curriculum, the role of the liberal arts, accommodations to technological and economic change, the expansion of access, the zigzags of institutional competition and strategies for survival in hard times, the impact of the system of electives at the undergraduate level from the end of the nineteenth century, and the relationships between a college education, professional preparation, and the employment market have all been hotly debated. They have at times had direct implications for the shape and the existence of institutions.

The acceptance, much earlier than in Europe, of undergraduate studies in subject areas like business and forestry, and the history from the 1860s of the growth of education in agriculture and the ‘mechanic arts’ in the ‘land-grant’ institutions, present quite a different trajectory of discussion and development from that in Britain and Europe. Within these American frameworks of concern and action questions of breadth and narrowness, specialization, the nature and purpose of a liberal or general education, the role of a liberal education as a preparation for the professions, and the sequencing and structure of study in secondary and post-secondary education, have been subjects of profound academic and public concern. In the pre-industrial United States, as in Europe, it was, as Dewey stressed, comparatively easier to assign a ‘distinct content and a distinct purpose’ when the class constituencies and their social and professional aspirations were clearly understood. In the 1790s Bowdoin College included ‘useful and liberal arts and sciences’ in its Charter (Sills 1944:401). Following the Morrill Act of 1862, Massachusetts—like other states—looked to its new Agricultural College ‘to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life’ (Massachusetts 1863). The former presents the ‘useful’ in association with the liberal arts and sciences within a confident understanding of overall purpose. The latter presents the liberal and the practical (‘without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics’) in confident juxtaposition, and in the American context it was not to be difficult to argue the case for the incorporation of the useful and the practical into the developing pattern of higher education. As one commentator has put it: The utilitarian tradition has deep roots in American life. A continent had to be developed’ (Mosely 1971:38).

The intrusion of the utilitarian into higher education curricula did not go without resistance and controversy, but the struggle over the reconciliation of the two threads in American higher education—its relationship to work and careers, and a liberal preparation for life (Newman 1979:51)—took place in different circumstances from those of nineteenth-century Britain. Many historians and educationists have commented on the uniquely American persistence of attention to the problems of a ‘liberal’ or ‘general’ education, and the battle to move curricula towards or away from a greater integration of the liberal/general and the professional has been a significant feature of higher education in the United States. It penetrated, much more explicitly than in Britain, the debates surrounding engineering education, for example, and the much more articulate American general education movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have at times gone much further than in Britain in addressing the curricular issues of breadth and specialization, the nature and balance of professional and pre-professional studies, the virtues and dangers of vocationalism, the role of the liberal arts as ‘tool’ subjects for professional curricula (Sanders 1954b:8), and the possibilities of interpreting and shaping professional courses as a liberal education. The nineteenth-century juxtapositions and antitheses, and attempts at reconciliation, have therefore been proj...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Frameworks
• Part Two Vocationalism—A Project
• Part Three A LIBERAL VOCATIONALISM?
• Appendix
• Bibliography