Development of Vocational Education Systems and Fields

Abstract

This chapter seeks to set out how the key of vocational education as a field and system of education has developed and been organised as a result of industrialisation and the formation of modern nation states. In particular, it considers how the vocational education sector developed through the needs of emerging nation states to (a) manage the effective supply and provision of skilled workers as a result of the decline of family-based processes of learning and the new requirements of modern industrial economies; (b) organise provisions to assist young people become employable; and (c) engage workers in a way which would achieve a nation state’s social and civic goals. In contrast to the uniform process of family-based, apprenticeship-type arrangements enacted across Europe in the previous millennium, there emerged in each country quite distinct vocational education systems whose form and organisation were framed by the particular institutional, social and economic imperatives. These same societal and economic transformations also generated growth in the range of occupations classified as professions, and whose preparation was seen as being required to be quite distinct (i.e. institution based) from that of other kinds of occupations. The growth of university-based provisions of vocational education that resulted from this imperative has continued and has become the central element of contemporary higher education provisions. Yet, the development of nation states and their desire to organise and manage social and economic activities also saw a growth in the power and interventions of state bureaucracies: