Role The of Career and Technical Education
(Developed from Administration of Vocational Education, Wenrich, R.C., Wenrich, J.W., and Galloway, J.D., Chapter 2, American Technical Publishers, Homewood, IL, 1988)
In December1998, The American Vocational Association (AVA) voted to make career and technical education as the moniker that best describes its work and profession and to identify its association. ACTE is the largest national vocational education organization, and its board members and staff have encouraged other organizations and government agencies to remove "vocational education" from titles, policy documents, and legislation and replace it with career and technical education. Today as we study career and technical education we must remember its history comes from vocational education. As Career and Technical education struggles to build a new identity, it should not forget the hard lessons learned in its formative years when it was known as vocational education.
EDUCATION FOR WORK
Career and technical education (C&TE) is one phase of the process of education for work. There are two reasons why it is important that educational planners understand work. First, through education, youth and adults can better understand function of work and its relationship to a full life and thereby motivate them to fully develop their potential for work. Second, as educational decision-makers realize how important work is in the lives of people, they will attach more importance to and become more knowledgeable about programs of education for work. Everybody has a different perception of work, depending upon one's intellectual understanding of what work is and one's experiences with it. Henry Van Dyke recognized the differences in opinion among people and wrote, "This is my work; my blessing, not my doom." On one hand, many people view work as good and desirable; others consider it a necessary evil that must be endured to provide the necessities of life. Why this tremendous range -- from elation to disgust -- in the attitudes of people toward their work? Work can be defined as physical or mental effort directed toward some end or purpose. When one works at a job, the end, or purpose, may be the paycheck, or it may be the joy and satisfaction derived from turning out a useful product. When people work as officers of a local parent-teacher association, the end or purpose may be to improve the school that their children attend, or to satisfy a personal need, such as recognition or a desire to be of service to their community. In any event there is, whether it is recognized or not, an end or purpose that motivates that person to work, on and off the job. Frequently, the motivation to work is based upon a consideration of several purposes. Work might be better understood by considering play. On the surface, work and play may appear to be antithetical. Certainly, the difference is not in the nature of the activity since two people might engage in the same activity, such as dancing, yet one is working while the other is playing. Few work harder physically than professional dancers, yet most of them seem to derive considerable pleasure from their "work." A farmer works in the fields, then relaxes by reading a magazine. A magazine editor, on the other hand, works while reading the magazine and relaxes by tending to the garden. It is obvious then that the difference between work and pray is not in the activity, but in the purpose. If the purpose
is to extract from the activity all the intrinsic values without considering extrinsic rewards, then it is fun and can be called play. To the extent that people can receive intrinsic or ego satisfactions and extrinsic rewards through their work, their work becomes more like play, more pleasurable, mote fun. While it is unlikely that a utopian situation will be achieved in which all individuals enjoy their work and everything about it, this condition can be approached by helping people understand that work is an essential function in their lives, and that the personal satisfactions derived from it depend, in part, upon their attitude toward work and the way work is structured. Levitan and Johnson in their book, Second Thoughts on Work, state that those who proclaim the demise of work have missed the mark. Work is surely here to stay, and it is only by virtue of the tremendous fruits of our labor that we can now contemplate more leisure time and greater choices in our selection of jobs. As we continue to rely upon work as the mainstay of our lives and our economy, we must also continue to search for the vehicles by which we can offer this role and its many benefits to all of society's members. (1982, p. 219) Work Through the Ages. The meaning of work has changed considerably through the ages. A brief review of the dominant meanings people have given to work at different times in history is interesting and enlightening. Like the Greeks and Romans, the Hebrews thought of work as painful drudgery. Early Christianity followed the Jewish tradition by regarding work as a punishment. But Christianity added a positive function, that work is necessary not only to earn one's living, but, above all, so that those who wished could share their profits with the poor. With the advent of the Reformation came a new atmosphere and a changed attitude toward work. Once people worked for a livelihood -- a means of subsistence. Now they worked for something beyond their daily bread; they worked because it was the right and moral thing to do. This Protestant or Puritan work ethic reached the United States during the middle of the nineteenth century, where it obtained its fullest expression. The impact of this "gospel of work,'' as it later came to be known, is discussed by DeGrazia. Perhaps the linking of work to God is no longer so clear as it once was, yet we can certainly see that the shadows of the great reformers fall over the idea of work in America. Here, all who can must work, and idleness is bad, too many holidays and nothing gets done, and by steady methodical work alone can we build a great and prosperous nation. Here, too, work is good for you, a remedy for pain, loneliness, the death of a dear one, a disappointment in love, or doubts about the purposes of life. (1962, p. 45) Why People Work. People work because they need to work. The need may be economic, but when this need is satisfied, they still want to work. Herzberg and others (1959, p. 137) conducted a study on the motivation to work. They concluded that the one most significant thing to be done to raise the mental health of the majority of our citizens is to increase the potential for motivation in their work. They recognized that there are large segments of our society that could not apply their prescriptions, but they rejected ``the pessimism that views the future as one in which work will become increasingly meaningless to most people and in which pursuits of leisure will become the most important end of our society." To structure the work situation so that the worker can get maximum satisfaction of personal needs and at the same rime meet the needs of the work organization or of the larger society is the task of every manager. In a society oriented toward the material aspects of life, the economic motives of humans tend to be overemphasized. Management incentive systems and labor contracts
emphasize the economic rewards and tend to ignore the intrinsic satisfactions that workers can and do derive from their work activities. Some people may work solely for financial reward, but to say that this is the only reason people work is to reveal a lack of understanding of the social and psychological needs of people. Friedmann and Havighurst (1954), in a study of the meaning of work, identified its functions: (1) income, (2) expenditure of time and energy, (3) identification and status, (4) association, and (5) source of meaningful life experiences. The functions of work can also be translated in terms of the needs of the individual. The following is a list of needs that can be satisfied, in part at least, through work. Many of these needs can also be satisfied through other kinds of life-activity, including play. 1. People need income. The need for money is basic. People work when they are hungry, but continue to work when they are well-fed, well-clothed, and wellhoused. In a study done a number of years ago, Morse and Weiss (1955) asked a group of employed people whether they would continue to work if they inherited enough money to live comfortably. Eighty percent said they would. 2. People need activity. The activity can be mental or physical, but usually it is a combination of both. People have time and energy to spend and need something to do to fill the day. Most people prefer to have a routine they can follow; even retired people work out a routine of activity for themselves. 3. People need self respect and the respect of others. Most people need recognition -- some more than others. People need to maintain or improve their social status. 4. People need social contacts and participation. They need to be associated with other people and have friendly relations with people. 5. People need to express themselves creatively. They need to find ways in which they can express their personalities in activities that have meaning for them. People need to have a purpose in life and most people need to feel useful and of service to others. Work has been studied in terms of its satisfactions and dissatisfactions. It is important to make a distinction between internal or ego satisfactions and extrinsic satisfactions. Ego satisfactions reflect the extent to which the job is an expression of some aspect of self and come from the type of work one does, its interest, value, variety, and the skills involved; the opportunities that the job offers in the way of responsibility, independence, and confidence, and the potential that the job offers for the gratification of interpersonal and friendship needs. Extrinsic satisfactions are those concerned with such things as money, job security, and working conditions. Professional persons and technicians are more likely to report ego satisfactions than are clerical workers, semiskilled workers, and unskilled workers. While persons in high status jobs -- professional, paraprofessional, and technical -- have relatively high levels of ego satisfaction, these groups are also among the highest in ego dissatisfactions or frustrations. It appears that people in high status jobs not only get more ego satisfaction in their work, but seek this gratification more, with a consequent greater frustration experience when these needs are felt to be unsatisfied. Work and Leisure. As out country shifts from a work-centered society to an economy of abundance, people will have time for more work activities outside of employment. These work activities during leisure time can have all the intrinsic satisfactions or ego gratifications that people get from work on the job. In fact, it is possible that the non-
economic values of work can nearly all be discovered and realized more fully in leisure time activities than they are in employment. As technology advances, more and more of the drudgery is taken out of work on the job and the old dichotomy of work and play may become meaningless. Whereas play was considered a rest from the burden of work, as work becomes less burdensome, the distinction between work and play will lessen. Friedmann and Havighurst (1954, p. 192) have stated a principle of "equivalence of work and play": "in our economy of abundance, where work is reduced in quantity and burdensomeness to a level where it is not physically unpleasant, many of the values of play can be achieved through work and of work through play." Work, including the work one does in one's daily employment, is the activity around which each person organizes daily experiences and through which each person hopes to establish a meaningful and rewarding life routine. One has but to witness the lives of people without work, or of people who lack edifying work, to realize the validity of the point of view that work is indeed a way of life. Elementary and secondary schools must provide experiences that will help children and youth understand and appreciate the value of work and its functions in life and help them develop their potential for satisfying work. Also, planners and managers of educational programs should structure their work organizations in such a way that all participants -students, teachers, counselors, and supervisors -- can get maximum ego satisfaction through their work. Definition. Public education in a democratic society is dominated by the idea or the ideal that all children and youth be provided with equal educational opportunities so that the potential of each individual might be developed as much as possible. All too frequently the phrase equal educational opportunities is taken to mean the same opportunities for all. But children and youth, like adults, are unique; no single curriculum or set of learning experiences can be expected to discover and develop the talents of all; diversity of educational programs is needed. Education for work can be defined as the total process of discovering and developing the individual's potential for work. Specialized career and technical education on the high school and post-secondary levels is an important part of the process of developing the individual's potential for work. Relationship of Work and Education. Primitive people did not need much formal education to work. Even in the early history of the United States most people learned to work by association with experienced workers. The skills and abilities needed to earn a livelihood and to make a life were generally learned in the home or on the farm, the parents teaching their children. Apprentice training was sometimes provided for other than orphans and poor children but even this form of education for work was frequently carried on in the craftsman's shop, which was part of the home. The family was a production unit as well as a social unit. Work and education were combined. With the shift to industrialization and specialization, work and education became separated. It was not uncommon for youth to be encouraged to stay in school and get an education so that they would not need to work as hard as their parents. Education was seen as a means to more leisure. There was danger of developing a labor class and a leisure class in democratic society. Over a hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln, in an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (September 30, 1859), said, "henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil . . . the great majority must labor at something productive. From these premises the problem springs. `How can labor and education be the most satisfactorily combined?'"
The opportunity to work, especially in a technological society, is dependent upon one's education and training. Although education has long been recognized as essential for those who are preparing to work in the professions, it is now also necessary for those who want to work in paraprofessional, technical, skilled, and semiskilled occupations. CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION AND LIBERAL EDUCATION The traditional conflict between vocational education and liberal education is no longer valid. It is based upon misconceptions of both and not upon the way these two purposes of education are currently conceived. Vocational Education has been misinterpreted by some as being too and narrow too specialized, concerned only with skills aimed at preparing for employment those youth who cannot succeed in academic pursuits. On the other hand, liberal education has been misunderstood by those who think it is too broad and too general, has no practical value, and is appropriate only for intellectually gifted students. These and other misconceptions about vocational and liberal education do have some basis when examined from a historical point of view. John Dewey (1944) is credited with the position that liberal education is any education that "liberates" humans as determined by the quality of their total life experiences, rather than by the supposition that certain subjects of study possess more power of liberation than others. Liberal education, then, must be defined in terms of life's problems as people face them; it must have human orientation and social direction; and the content must be relevant to the demands of modern society. All individuals should have the benefit of an education that liberates; that is, liberal education with its content and methods shifted from its original aristocratic intent to the service of democracy. Defined in this way, liberal education is not the exclusive right of any segment of our society. Although career and technical education is specialized education, it need not be narrow or restrictive. The scope of career and technical education offerings in the small high school is a limiting factor, but area C&TE centers serving youth from a number of high schools in the area greatly enlarge the range of offerings. The program an individual has selected in a vocational education curriculum can be broadened through elective courses. The courses taken deal directly with the area of specialization for only part of the time; the remaining time can be used to explore subjects outside the prescribed program or to pursue cultural or avocational interests. Career and technical education is concerned not only with the skills involved in an occupation but with all of the competencies needed to function effectively in employment which includes the cognitive and the psychomotor skills required in the particular occupation. The proportions of each vary greatly from one occupation to another. But vocational education goes beyond the mental and the physical skills needed; it is also concerned with the attitudes and values of the worker -- the affective domain. Career and technical education has a broadening effect in that it can motivate the learner who becomes interested in preparing for a particular occupation and then discovers that subjects which have been previously rejected are essential to performance in that field. The relevance of mathematics, science, social studies, and almost any other subject may not become evident for some learners until they face real problems requiring a knowledge of these subjects for their solution. Career and technical education, if properly organized, should encourage and promote upward mobility. It is broad enough to prepare a student for a range of occupations within each family or cluster of occupations so that a student may "spin off' after a short period of preparation into a skilled job in that occupational field. The student may continue at the same institution or at higher institutions and prepare for employment requiring a higher level of preparation; this is the ladder concept in career and technical education. Community colleges have become more active in coordinating curriculum with local high
schools. In addition, many community colleges and four-year institutions use the ladder concept to provide a higher level of preparation. In the early history of vocational education the emphasis was on meeting the production needs of society. While this is still an important function, the emphasis has shifted so that C&TE educators are now more concerned about what vocational education can do to enrich the lives of the people it serves. The federal Vocational Education Act of 1963 and subsequent amendments reflect this change in emphasis. Some critics of vocational education claim that it has been used to exploit youth by providing cheap labor for employers by limiting training programs to those occupations for which there are job opportunities in the local community. Career and technical education can and should increase the options available to youth. This is one of its recognized objectives. This goal, however, cannot be achieved in small high schools offering only one or two specialized C&TE curricula. In the report of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Humanizing the Secondary School, Saylor states, "A humane secondary school is one that provides a broad and comprehensive curriculum in which ample opportunity exists for the optimum exploration and development at the adolescent level of talents and capabilities of all youth of the community. and one in which teaching and instruction are primarily designed to foster such development" (1969, p. 124). Making a wide range of C&TE programs available to youth will help them realize their capabilities and potential for success in the work world and thereby serve to liberate them from an educational program that lacks relevance for them. Traditional vocational education was frequently thought of as materialistic and concerned only with the economics of earning a living. If properly conceived, career and technical education can and should be as humanistic as any other education. Furthermore, any subject that carries a C&TE label can be as liberal as any liberal arts subject. It is not the subject matter, but rather what educators do with subject matter that determines the values in education. OCCUPATIONS AS THE BASIS OF EDUCATION John Dewey, while on the faculty of the University of Michigan (1884-1894), became interested in education and recognized the need for educational reform. The idea of making occupations the vehicle for elementary and secondary education was developed at this time. Dewey's philosophy was based upon a total organism interacting with its environment. The mind was conceived as the process by which organisms and environment become integrated. Dewey believed that human intellectual life developed in relation to needs and opportunities for action and that the problem of education was to create a program that would not only include initial school experiences appropriate for children beginning their school work, but also serve as a basis for a unified progression of studies at more advanced levels. Occupations seemed to supply the answer. Occupations, such as gardening, cooking, textile work, and carpentry, provided, in the words of Dewey in a lecture on pedagogy (Wirth, 1966, p. 131), ``activities which are genuine and timeless. Their reality excites the interest of the child and enlists his efforts, for they are what his elders do, have done, and must continue to do." The occupations as the basis for structuring an educational program conformed with Dewey's psychological theory that there are four natural instincts in children: (1) the constructive. (2) the investigative and experimental, (3) the social, and (4) the expressive. "The fundamental point in the psychology of an occupation," said Dewey, is that it maintains a balance between the intellectual and practical phases of experience. As an occupation it is active or motor; it finds expression through the physical organs, the eyes, the hands, etc. But it also involves continual observation of materials, and continued planning and reflection in
order that the practical or executive side may be successfully carried on. Dewey was concerned about having a conceptual unity and coherence in the whole educational effort from the preprimary level through to the university and recognized a problem at the high school level since it had then, as now, a dual role--the traditional and long-standing college preparation function and a major responsibility as a "people's college" for those who would not continue their education beyond high school. Dewey recognized, according to Wirth, "that the high school is characterized by more specialization as the child's interest and society's needs demand it. Specialization wrongly pursued, however, can lead to narrowness and monotony. Therefore, the task is to emphasize the benefits of specialized work and avoid its negative aspects. Specialized study must never lose sight of the connectedness and interaction with the whole experience of which the subject at hand is a mere fragment" (1966, p. 224). In a day when most occupations, other than the professions, involved little more than skill and the repeated applications of a few rules-of-thumb, the idea of vocational education as illiberal may have had some validity. But technology has brought the sciences and the arts to vocations so that study in preparation for a vocation is a means of providing a broad and liberating education. Opposed to vocational education that would be limited to the mere acquisition of job skills, Dewey felt that the underlying principles of the work processes and the social significance of work must be included and that through vocational studies culture might be made truly vital for many students. Just as it is important for the employment-bound student to be exposed to science, his...