Marvin Lazerson

What Makes a Revolution? Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 1980–2000

DOCUMENT RESUME

The Education Gospel and the Role of Vocationalism in American Education

The Education Gospel—the idea that formal schooling preparing individuals for employment can resolve all public and private dilemmas—has become dominant in the United States and many other countries. Over the twentieth century, it has led to high schools, community colleges, and universities becoming focused on occupational preparation and also to many other changes in the size and funding of education, the connections between schooling and employment, and the mechanisms of inequality. Moving ahead in the twenty‐first century will require understanding the strengths and the limitations of both the Education Gospel and vocationalism.

The Education Gospel and Vocationalism in US Higher Education: Triumphs, Tribulations, and Cautions for Other Countries

The education gospel, both in the United States and in other countries, calls for increasing levels of education and orienting schools and colleges around preparation for occupations. In the United States this has led to vocationalizing the university as well as other levels of schooling. This trend over more than a century has made the American university the primary avenue for individual mobility and a crucial source of research for national and regional growth. However, these changes have also created several dilemmas for the professionalized university including the demise of liberal or general education, a number of critiques of professional education, utilitarian and narrow conceptions of education among students, the dangers of overeducation, and serious equity effects. The result is that, even though everyone wants access to the American university, no one is satisfied with it. The chapter also explores the history of American and German borrowing from one another. These have often been based on mistaken assumptions about the other country’s practices, and some current German reforms seem likely to follow this pattern.