Author: Dana Hirsch
De-specialization trend in Vocational Education and Training: labour process changes and the new international division of labour as determinations of technical secondary school reforms since 1970s
Changes in labour processes since the 1970s and the development of a new international division of labour, had its correlate in the debates about which productive attributes were demanded by the new job profiles and how the educational system should change with it. In particular, curricular debates and educational reform processes around VET (vocational education and training) took place in different national spaces, mainly from the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, this track of secondary school tended to become less specialized. We can identify three trends in technical-oriented secondary school changes that led to a more de-specialized, with greater integration of contents and more flexible curriculum design.
1) De-specialized curricular structure: the increase of general knowledge and the delay of the specialization starting point is a trend in all secondary school tracks since mid 20th century, but in VET, the debate took place around the change from "mono-professional" curricular designs to "professional families" based one, in order to form broader professional profiles with the ability to assume broader labour roles.
2) Competency-based curricular approach: the bibliography had general agreement in the need for VET to train in more general competences instead of qualifications associated with specific job tasks; this meant leaving behind several conceptions (training based on disciplines, theoretical knowledge that is practically applied in the workspace and skills addition) and moving forward the integration of knowledge, skills and attitudes in order to solve problematic situations in changing contexts; curricular design organized around "problems" and "projects" were common didactic proposals.
3) Flexible curricular structure: curricular design changes introduced the possibility of diversifying educational paths; this could mean regional or institutional differences in the curricula, the possibility that each student chose his own combination of subjects, leading to different training paths or even the possibility that this path could be completed in different public and private institutions.
This dissertation pursues two objectives. First, to explain the social need of these curricular proposals for VET, looking for its foundations in the labour process transformations and the productive attributes that it demands. An analysis of VET´s and labour process characteristics before 1970s will be held, in order to understand the underlying determination of de-specialized workforce education. Second, to identify differences in the way these reforms were implemented by several countries, developing a materialist explanation of the difference in these trends´ progress. This means that automation and informatization progress in production, communication and transport will be taken into account for the explanation, as well as the place that the countries occupy in the new international division of labour that this progress enables. In particular, how dependent their productive processes are on manual and other kind of human-skilled intervention. The focus will be on de-specialized workforce education as a general trend in capitalism that does not unfold in a direct way.