The objection that the vocational track teaches students specific skills they need for their first job, while the academic track teaches students general skills they need for every job, is confused, Bryan Caplan argues (in The Case Against Education):
While literacy and numeracy are genuinely general skills, most academic classes amount to vocational training for ultrarare vocations.
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“Traditionalists” want to train everyone for long-shot, prestigious careers like author, historian, political scientist, translator, physicist, and mathematician. So-called vocationalists want to train students for careers they’re likely to enter. The traditional route is painless for educators: teach your students whatever your teachers taught you. The vocational route is painful for educators: to follow it, we must keep tabs on student aptitudes and the job market.
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What’s the point of prepping students for the economy of 2015, when they’ll be employed in the economy of 2025 or 2050? Fair enough, but this is no argument for old-school academics. Ignorance of the future is no excuse for preparing students for occupations they almost surely won’t have. And if we know anything about the future of work, we know that demand for authors, historians, political scientists, translators, physicists, and mathematicians will stay low.
The crowd-pleasing objection to vocationalism, though, is not epistemic, but egalitarian. Placing everyone on the academic track seems more equal than sorting children by “aptitude” and assigning them to “suitable” training. You could say equality is already an illusion; despite the fiction of college prep for all, colleges count only honors and A.P. as the genuine article.
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Keeping bored, resentful kids on the academic track backfires. Instead of “downshifting” to vocational training, they settle for unskilled labor—or worse. Remember: about 20% of Americans never earn a standard high school diploma.
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Historically, teachers trained students for three specific professions: the clergy, law, and medicine. The modern curriculum is more versatile but has changed far less than educators like to think. Today’s schools prepare students for careers as authors, poets, mathematicians, scientists, artists, musicians, historians, translators, and professional athletes. Yet the fraction of students who enter these occupations is trivial. Contrary to popular proeducation rhetoric, schools devote little time to “general skills.” Instead, students spend their days training for jobs few want and even fewer get.
It is very hard to give honest and constructive feedback on complicated student projects that might prove a student has skill. If it were easier to give feedback, training desired skills would be much easier.
Whether any form of training can really imbue a student with skill is questionable. Skill is like a delicate seedling: the teacher can try to provide the right conditions and after that everyone can HOPE that the student manifests skill by mysterious processes.
Of course, conventional classroom methods such as tests often suffice to filter out most students who have not manifested the proper type and degree of skill. But many students test well in the classroom and badly elsewhere. Relatedly, many students initially convince their teachers that they (the students) are as dumb as rocks, but then those students grow up and are ultimately recognized as skilled.