Teaching the World to Work: Industrial Education as U.S. Imperial Tradition

Abstract

In 2015, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) distributed a press release touting the transformative effects of what it called a “new sustainable … workplace model” in Afghanistan. Implicit in the write-up was the idea that labor could redeem a nation torn apart by serial foreign interventions and civil conflicts. Vocational jargon was front and center: if Afghan jobseekers could grasp the “concept of networking” and seize “growth opportunities” a new culture of “workforce development” might accomplish what fourteen years of armed occupation had not. The story of Sayed Hamid, a twenty-seven-year-old loan officer from Mazar-i-Sharif trained by USAID’s Afghanistan Workforce Development Program, illustrated this for readers. Hamid attributed his career successes to skills learned through the U.S.-run program and suggested there would be profound shifts in Afghan society if foreign agencies focused closely on “labor market demand.”1 A subsequent agency report framed his story within a larger one about the U.S. reinvigoration of vocational education in Afghanistan.2