what we talk about when we talk about vocational education

My honors students discussed Mike Rose's The Mind at Work tonight, especially two chapters on vocational educational programs. Rose suggests that the pervasive mind-body separation and hierarchy is a misleading way to understand work, since in fact much of the labor we usually call "working-class" involves a great deal of cognition. This calls into question the idea that vocational training should exclude academic and humanistic-liberal subjects. If mechanics, for example, requires high-order "mind work," ought mechanics classes in high school vo-tech programs come at the expense of physics, Spanish, and the like?

Students in the class described familiar high school experiences: twelth graders on the vo-tech track leaving for the afternoon for job training courses, etc. We worked to unpack the language we use to talk about vocational training, especially regarding issues of agency ("students need useful skills," "the community needs a trained workforce," "kids who don't want to go to college need lucrative know-how," etc.). Who benfits from the language of need? Whose "needs" do the familiar tropes of vo-tech learning obscure (e.g., industry that benefits by having public moneys pay to train its workers)? Good discussion, good group of students.