Vocational Training In this latterday academic enterprise, that looks so shrewdly to practical expediency, "vocational training" has, quite as a matter of course, become a conspicuous feature. The adjective is a new one, installed expressly to designate this line of endeavour, in the jargon of the educators; and it carries a note of euphemism. "Vocational training" is training for proficiency in some gainful occupation, and it has no connection with the higher learning, beyond that juxtaposition given it by the inclusion of vocational schools in the same corporation with the university; and its spokesmen in the university establishments accordingly take an apologetically aggressive attitude in advocating its claims. Educational enterprise of this kind has, somewhat incontinently, extended the scope of the corporation of learning by creating, "annexing," or "affiliating" many establishments that properly lie outside the academic field and deal with matters foreign to the academic interest, -- fitting schools, high-schools, technological, manual and other training schools for mechanical, engineering and other industrial pursuits, professional schools of divers kinds, music schools, art schools, summer schools, schools of "domestic science,""domestic economy," "home economics", (in short, housekeeping), schools for the special training of secondary-school teachers, and even schools that are avowedly of primary grade; while a variety of "university extension" bureaux have also been installed, to comfort and edify the unlearned with lyceum lectures, to dispense erudition by mail-order, and to maintain some putative contact with amateur scholars and dilettanti beyond the pale.
On its face, this enterprise in assorted education simulates the precedents given by the larger modern business coalitions, which frequently bring under one general business management a considerable number and variety of industrial plants. Doubtless a boyish imitation of such business enterprise has had its share in the propagation of these educational excursions. It all has an histrionic air, such as would suggest that its use, at least in good part, might be to serve as an outlet for the ambition and energies of an executive gifted with a penchant for large and difficult undertakings, and with scant insight into the needs and opportunities of a corporation of the higher learning, and who might therefore be carried off his scholastic footing by the glamour of the exploits of the trustmakers. No doubt, the histrionic proclivities of the executive, backed by a similar sensibility to dramatic effect on the part of their staff and of the governing boards, must be held accountable for much of this headlong propensity to do many other things half-way rather than do the work well that is already in hand. But this visible histrionic sensibility, and the glamour of great deeds, will by no means wholly account for current university enterprise along this line; not even when there is added the urgent competitive need of a show of magnitude, such as besets all the universities;nor do these several lines of motivation account for the particular direction so taken by these excursions in partes infidelium. At the same time, reasons of scholarship or science plainly have no part in the movement.
Apart from such executive weakness for spectacular magnitude, and the competitive need of formidable statistics, the prime mover in the case is presumably the current unreflecting propensity to make much of all things that bear the signature of the "practical." These various projections of university enterprise uniformly make some plausible claim of that nature.
Any extension of the corporation's activity can be more readily effected, is accepted more as an expedient matter of course, if it promises to have such a "practical" value. "Practical" in this connection means useful for private gain; it need imply nothing in the way of serviceability to the common good.
The same spirit shows itself also in a ceaseless revision of the schedule of instruction offered by the collegiate or undergraduate division as such, where it leads to a multiplication of courses desired to give or to lead up to vocational training. So that practical instruction, in the sense indicated, is continually thrown more into the foreground in the courses offered, as well as in the solicitude of the various administrative boards, bureaux and committees that have to do with the organization and management of the academic machinery.
As has already been remarked, these directive boards, committees, and chiefs of bureau are chosen, in great part, for their businesslike efficiency, because they are good office-men, with "executive ability"; and the animus of these academic businessmen, by so much, becomes the guiding spirit of the corporation of learning, and through their control it acts intimately and pervasively to order the scope and method of academic instruction. This permeation of the university's everyday activity by the principles of competitive business is less visible to outsiders than the various lines of extraneous enterprise already spoken of, but it touches the work within the university proper even more radically and insistently; although, it is true, it affects the collegiate (undergraduate) instruction more immediately than what is fairly to be classed as university work. The consequences are plain. Business proficiency is put in the place of learning. It is said by advocates of this move that learning is hereby given a more practical bent; which is substantially a contradiction in terms. It is a case not of assimilation, but of displacement and substitution, garnished with circumlocution of a more or less ingenuous kind.
