The New Vocationalism: What It Is, What It Could Be.

The development of integrated instruction organized around broadly defined occupations - or a combination of occupations, social problems, and other engaging topics - provides the opportunity to create heterogeneous forms of schooling that are "separate but equal." Such a principled heterogeneity represents a relatively egalitarian way to respond to diversity in all its forms, Mr. Grubb suggests. Vocationalism is rampant once again. The claims that schooling ought to better prepare workers for the 21st century have become increasingly strident since the publication of A Nation at Risk more than a decade ago. Various practices to incorporate work-related skills into the curriculum have been proposed, and the most recent initiative of the Clinton Administration - the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 - has attracted an amazing amount of attention for what is, after all, a piddling program. No one is proposing to resurrect conventional vocational education, but the notion that public education should be more "relevant" to our country's economic future is widespread. How should education respond? The movements within the "new vocationalism" include many odd partners with wildly differing ideas of how to respond to economic imperatives. Some are atavistic; others claim to have discovered such new directions as the shift to a "high-skills economy"; still others have rediscovered practices with long and checkered histories in our schools, such as work-based learning. Many of these reforms have the potential to improve teaching and learning. But the nature of these reforms, their links to vocational purposes, and the specific ways in which they might improve learning remain murky. Moreover, many forms of the "new vocationalism" are only barely emerging. In this article I disentangle the strands of renewed interest in the occupational purposes of schooling, concentrating on the high school - the institution that seems both the least successful and the most resistant to change. After describing five different versions of the "new vocationalism," I interpret these changes through a matrix of approaches to pedagogy and to academic and vocational content. The penultimate section examines the economic context of the "new vocationalism," and the final section examines the prospects for reform. There are strong reasons to think that enduring reforms are possible, but there are equally powerful forces that might sweep away the most innovative aspects of the "new vocationalism." Our tasks are to identify those elements that merit widespread adoption and to institutionalize them so that they are not blown away by the first winds of pedagogical conservatism. Practices of the 'New Vocationalism' A Nation at Risk, generally conceded to be the spark that ignited the current reform movement, epitomizes the first strand of the new vocationalism. The great threat to our country's future was "a rising tide of mediocrity" in the schools, which was causing a decline in competitiveness with the Japanese, the South Koreans, and the Germans. Subsequent commission reports picked up the economic rationale for education reform, with such titles as Higher Education and the American Resurgence. To be sure, the emphasis on economic roles for schooling was leavened with a nod to the importance of preparing a well-informed citizenry: both A Nation at Risk and Higher Education and the American Resurgence approvingly quoted Thomas Jefferson on this subject. But the connection between education and democracy came off as an afterthought. The dominant rationale given for schooling - indeed, the only apparent rationale in the more utilitarian reports, such as the report of the Secretary [of Labor]'s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), What Work Requires of Schools - was the preparation of future workers. But the content of schooling was not to change. A Nation at Risk recommended the "New Basics": English, math, science, social studies, and (the only novelty) half a year of computer science. …