Thoughts on vocational education

Einstein once said, 

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he—with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.

It is this ability to produce human beings, who are something more than beasts through their understanding of values, their sense of beauty and moral good, for which education should be valued. However, in this late stage of global industrial civilization we have successfully reduced every aspect of human life into commodities that can be sold and bought at the market place. Values and moral good are passé in this age of pragmatism bordering on opportunism. Even our deep personal emotions can be sold at a premium on reality TV or displayed on Facebook. We have silently accepted it as a norm that price of anything and everything will be determined by the logic of demand and supply in the marketplace. Finally, we are placing education in the same basket by reducing its meaning to a mere accumulation of degrees and skills to earn a livelihood. 

This predicament is inherent in the dominant values prevalent in our times. Man is not viewed as an agent capable of critical thought, capable of bringing about social change, capable of making history and capable of building new institutions. Rather man is reduced to the ignominy of a consuming animal. Greater the level of consumption, greater is one’s value in the society. In this competition of vulgar consumerism, along with the consumers, also needed is an army of laborers, who make themselves up the broad base of the pyramid of consumers, to produce consumable goods. An education system overemphasizing vocational training caters to the need of the marketplace to produce this army of laborers. 

It is undeniable that we all need to learn skills that are socially useful and that help us make a living. Precisely for this reason it is easy to be convinced that vocational training will make our students more `employable’. But it is important to emphasize that an education system putting undue emphasis on vocational training does not build a healthy society. After all, healthy societies are built on things that are to a large extent intangible and not on the logic of marketplace. 

I quote journalist Chris Hedges on what he had to say about the American education system and society in 2009 [1]:

``We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories (emphasis mine) that produce corporate drones and chase after ... grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press ... confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics ... We kneel before a self elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. ... Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification.’’

It is time to stand back and ask the broad questions about what should be an  education policy in our concrete social context that produces harmoniously developed human beings who are also socially productive rather than corporate drones.

Reference:

[1] Chris Hedges, ``America is in Need of a Moral Bailout,’’ truthdig.com, March 23, 2009.