John Dewey, Smith-Hughes, and Vocational Education: A New Impetus for an Old Discussion

Many modern discussions on Vocational education and Training (VET) only consider it’s goals in terms of the labor market or social inclusion. This article argues that vocations are an important contribution to the common good of society as whole, and not only a method of securing laborers. In order to acknowledge this contribution there needs to be a reorientation on VET from an educational perspective first and foremost. In order to do this, this article revisits a public debate John Dewey had with two early educational reformers David Snedden and Charles Prosser in the early twentieth century. In this debate, the economic arguments used by Snedden and Prosser, which have found their echoes in the modern VET debates were opposed to the educational arguments of Dewey. This article wishes to show the significant educational nature of Dewey’s counter arguments and argue for the relevance of this approach in the modern VET discussion.

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Notes

Our perspective is mostly informed by the European conditions of VET, yet the same debates can easily be identified in other national and international perspectives too (e.g. UNESCO 2022).

In our definition of what education is and should aim for we follow the Australian pedagogue Stephen Kemmis: ‘Education, properly speaking, is the process by which children, young people and adults are initiated into forms of understanding, modes of action and ways of relating to one another and the world that foster (respectively) individual and collective self-expression, individual and collective self-development, and individual and collective self- determination, and that are, in these senses, oriented towards the good for each person and the good for humankind’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, 26). In other words, education for a common good. We will use education instead of schooling as that is talking about the system of education (and thus not the education itself) or training, which implies specifically teaching students specific skills needed for a certain task. While these forms of learning can be valuable, as shall become clear, they are not necessarily educational.

In this article we approach the common good as a continuous process in the making. By this we mean that there can be no a priori definitions what this common good looks like as that which defines our common good is constantly changing. That being said, it is a concept that grows from our shared concern with the question: What does it mean to live well together? In this way, it also fosters solidarity as people have a shared concern with this question. However, what we see in VET now is that the definition of common good is very often already defined as getting and keeping a job in the labour market. Furthermore, there are no discussions with students or workers about what it means to have a contribution from any specific vocation to our common world. As we shall discuss later in this article, this ignores the actual educational dimension of vocational education.

It was the lack of manual workers that these programs produced that lead to the dissatisfaction that eventually created a bipartisan coalition which demanded “real vocational education” and a ‘trade training undiluted by symbolic moralism about the regenerative effects of craftmanship.’ (Kett 2017, 510).

This argument that VET is for the “unsuitables” both in intellectual and social sense is in line with Snedden and Prosser and we see this as a hidden assumption in policy documents, such as publications by UNESCO (2022). Furthermore, one of the main things Dewey feared from the ratification of the Smith-Hughes Act was the collapse of the egalitarian school system in favour of a narrow conception of vocational education (Becker 1980).

Fittingly for the observations in this article, this term was actively used in a popular sense by the economist Kenneth Arrow (e.g. Arrow 1971).

In Art as Experience (1934) this is exactly the question Dewey asks and answers. Present in both time and present in direct interaction from the vocation.

And authors such as Ingold have already argued in extension that this is not an issue as new skills will eventually pop up around the new technology through the vocations themselves. In other words, the vocations might change but will not be “deskilled” unless we stop intelligently habituating them and using them to engage with our world (Ingold 2000).

References

Acknowledgements

The authors have written this article while funded by the SOLiDi Program: SOLiDi has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 956919.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Education, Culture, and Society (ECS), Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Andreas Vesaliusstraat 2, Postbox 3761, Leuven, Belgium Jesse Albert Torenbosch & Joke Vandenabeele
  1. Jesse Albert Torenbosch