Change of Address?: educating economics in vocational education and training[1]

[1] Invited address to the joint (EPD‐EPU Conference on Reconstruction, Development and the National Qualifications Framework, South Africa, August, 1997

Abstract

This article offers an account of the ways in which economics has triumphed over vocational education and particularly equity in Australia. It shows how the language of macro and micro economic reform and markets currently holds state and commonwealth governments and education policy makers under its sway. The article shows how educationally and possibly economically hollow this triumph is by pointing to some of the problems that economic reductionism helps to cause and to some of the important human matters that it neglects. Finally, the article offers a conceptual framework for attending to matters of life chances and life choices or what Giddens calls emancipatory politics and life politics. In so doing it brings to vocational education and training several new bodies of literature thus assisting the field to see the economic in a more powerful life and to properly recognise its rich potential to enhance the life of work.

[1] Invited address to the joint (EPD‐EPU Conference on Reconstruction, Development and the National Qualifications Framework, South Africa, August, 1997

Notes

[1] Invited address to the joint (EPD‐EPU Conference on Reconstruction, Development and the National Qualifications Framework, South Africa, August, 1997