Education and the Ideology of Production

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue, ‘what is new in the new vocationalism?’ It concentrates on ‘behavioural occupationalism’, i.e. the derivation of ‘educational’ objectives from behaviourally defined occupational skills as constructed through occupational skills inventories. It contrasts this approach to ‘the world of work’ with that current in the ROSLA period under the influence of the Newsom Report. It is argued that the two approaches present radically different ways of contextualising ‘the world of work’ within educational discourse. The distinction between the behavioural and the liberal education approaches is explored in terms of a proposed restructuring of educational practices in terms of their relationship to (a) elaborating and potentially critical knowledge and (b) production as represented in a particular ideological form. It is argued that the ‘new vocationalism’ is expressing a new ‘hidden curriculum’ of the possessive individualism of market economics and that this reflects political and ideological imperatives rather than the immediate needs of the economy. The ‘new vocationalism’ is seen as an ideology of production regulating education rather than as an educational ideology servicing production.