Vocationalism and Higher Education
We are currently witnessing a wholesale transformation of our universities, one in which institutions of higher learning are rapidly becoming professional and technical schools. “Higher education” is increasingly understood as an enterprise which seeks to provide students with those instrumental and technical skills directly tied to jobs. We are everywhere obsessed with credentials, certificates and qualifications at the expense of education.
At the heart of the dilemma lies a straightforward conflict between a view of the university as an institution designed for the preservation and dissemination of scholarship and education, with that of a training school, which focuses on providing students with skills relevant to employment and the economy. Simply put, is the university an educational institution or a vocational one?
The sad truth is that we are rapidly losing sight of the very idea of education as something distinct from preparing students for the workforce. “Education” is now used – even by people who know better – more or less synonymously with job or career preparation. This conflation of terms is further exacerbated by the fact that discussions of higher education are now dominated by words, concepts and categories borrowed from the business and corporate world; and this vocabulary seduces us into thinking and acting in such terms. For example, senior administration now routinely employ such strategies as “Total Quality Management” (or TQM) or “Responsibility Centered Management” (or RCM). Similarly, The Globe and Mail in its “Report on Universities”, argues that universities need to understand the student as a “consumer”. In the opinion of the Globe’s editorial writer, this verbal innovation is long overdue.
The result of all this is that the university now comports itself like any other rationally-ordered business in the marketplace. This means keeping current “clients” (what many of us still stubbornly refer to as “students”) satisfied, while finding ways to capture a bigger market share, that is, more so-called clients. The obvious means of achieving both goals is by giving customers what they want. And what the customer wants – or so the marketers say – are vocational and professional credentials which translate into jobs. In brief, we’ve allowed our proud Canadian tradition of education to be reduced to what a former age would more honestly and more accurately call “job-training.”
No institution can be all things to all people. Universities need to focus on doing what they do best – cultivating in students that quest for knowledge and understanding that Aristotle spoke of as the defining characteristic of the human condition. An ancient and invaluable educational ideal is under siege. This is the notion which was first articulated by the Greeks, and which maintains that our human potential can only be realized through the development of the mind and the inculcation of a critical intelligence. We are the sort of beings who require intellectual stimulation. We need to have our imaginative horizons engaged and extended. We aspire to become more fully aware of our own existence. We struggle to achieve our highest potential, and fully realize our human self.
These are the aims of liberal learning, ones which until very recently guided the university’s central mission, which is the education of undergraduates. They have been overthrown by naive appeals to a crude sort of economic utility.
The challenge in front of us is to restore to its rightful place an understanding of education which transcends the market. We need to recover the time-honoured educational ideal which posits that our students are more than mere consumers, and that education – as distinct from schooling – is fundamentally about the uniquely human mind and uniquely human achievements, rather than those pragmatic and utilitarian considerations needed to fuel the needs of the corporate state.
Patrick Keeney is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Education at SFU. He is currently teaching in the School of Education at Thompson Rivers University. He is the co- editor of Prospero: A journal for new thinking in philosophy for education.
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