Vocational Education

History

If educational processes are thought of broadly as the upbringing and instruction of the young in the basic skills of living, survival, and reproduction, a process that is needed to secure the continuity of any society into the next generation, then vocational education is probably older than any other kind of education. The nomadic existence of primitive societies centered on such activities as hunting and food gathering within distinct groups or communities. So early educational processes were no doubt focused on passing on to the young people of these communities the elements of such key activities as hunting, fishing, preparing food, making clothing, and caring for the young. Later on, as the development of agriculture enabled people to live in one place more or less permanently, villages and then towns were created. This led to educational processes becoming more complex as job specialization intensified. The more generic roles involved in hunting and food gathering gave way to a diversity of more specialist roles. The various basic trades developed, and with them came the concept of apprenticeship. The institution of formal and legal arrangements for apprenticeships can be regarded as the beginnings of formal vocational education and training (VET). Although the learning continued to be “on the job,” the formal specification of the range of learning that the master was expected to provide for the apprentice represented an important step beyond the mere informal passing on of manual skills from one generation [Page 1004]to the next. Alongside of these emerging VET arrangements were the beginnings of what was to become university (or higher) education. This centered on religious institutions as major centers of learning, with a particular focus on the preparation of entrants to a priestly or religious vocation. Later, the other traditional professions, particularly law and medicine, became part of these early higher education arrangements. However, the rapid growth of what was to become the formal education system awaited the stimulus of the industrial revolution. With the rapid creation of increasing numbers of jobs that required significant literacy and numeracy, first elementary (or primary) schooling became more widespread and, eventually, compulsory. This pattern was repeated later by secondary schooling. Yet, over the lengthy time during which the formal educational mainstream (primary, secondary, higher education) developed, in most cases VET remained curiously isolated from this mainstream. This is despite the fact that VET was the means whereby the vast majority of people came to learn their occupational skills. Apprenticeships and other VET courses had become significantly more formal, though many, perhaps most, occupations were still learned informally, on the job.

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