Abstract
The chapter traces recent philosophical interest in vocational education from the beginnings of modern analytic philosophy of education in the 1960s through some of the major philosophical debates about vocational education that have emerged over the past half century. The shift in a good many countries towards so-called competence-based approaches along with the advent of the European Qualification Framework can be seen to have raised profound questions about vocational knowledge and the problems associated with the use of assessment and the international harmonization of occupational standards. There has been a revitalized interest in longstanding philosophical disputes relating to the knowing-how/knowing that distinction and the relationship between theory and practice. The chapter maps recent philosophical thinking on these issues and proposes some possible resolutions. The discussion concludes by indicating some apparent limitations of analytic philosophy, suggesting that there are other traditions (e.g. phenomenological, hermeneutic, pragmatic) which have the potential to provide a richer and more coherent account of the vocational enterprise.
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Notes
- 1.
Peters overlooks the important sense in which we might distinguish engineering on the one hand, and learning to be an engineer on the other. As Peter Winch (1965) rightly notes (albeit in a rather different context) there is a fundamental difference between “an engineer studying the workings of a machine” and “an apprentice engineer who is studying what engineering, that is, the activity of engineering is all about” (p. 88). While there is a sense in which the former might be said to be philosophically uninteresting, the same could certainly not be said of the latter.
- 2.
Peters was by no means alone in his approach to such concepts; indeed there is evidence that he was quite influential on this score, with similar analyses to be found in the work of a good many other philosophers and educationalists from the 1960s through to the present day (see Lum 2009).
- 3.
For a fuller account of the role of analytic philosophy of education and conceptual analysis in relation to theorising about the vocational see Lum (2009).
- 4.
- 5.
The first Director of the UK’s National Council for Vocational Qualifications, Gilbert Jessup, unwittingly provided a more exact characterisation of the so-called competence-based S/NVQs when he proclaimed that:
statements must accurately communicate their intent. ... a precision in the use of language in such statements will need to be established, approaching that of a science. The overall model stands or falls on how effectively we can state competence and attainment. (Jessup 1991, p. 134)
- 6.
See Hyland (1994) for a comprehensive critical survey of the competence debate.
- 7.
Donald Davidson (2001) has noted the important sense in which we are able to “assemble such material into a convincing picture of a mind” (p. 15).
- 8.
- 9.
See Clarke and Winch (eds.) (2007).
- 10.
- 11.
For a useful survey of the issues see Bengson and Moffett (eds.) (2011).
- 12.
Wolf borrows the phrase from the Higginson Report on the reform of ‘A’ levels.
- 13.
- 14.
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Lum, G. (2018). Vocational Education. In: Smeyers, P. (eds) International Handbook of Philosophy of Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72761-5_76
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