Introduction

This chapter introduces our inquiry as to whether vocational education for young people can be understood only as the acquisition of work skills or whether it can support human flourishing and social justice whilst retaining its connections to working life. We compare an international neoliberal discourse, which equates vocational education with market-based understandings of skill, whilst constructing a deficient vocational subject, to oppositional yet overlapping alternatives based on dominant European national ‘skill systems’. Arguing that such questions of education and skill cannot be considered independently of societal, historical and political dimensions, we examine whether attention to perspectives independent from these dominant accounts can lead to a socially just vocational endeavour and richer thinking about the relationship between education and work. We introduce our central example, the retrieval and revision of historical German understandings of vocational Bildung , concluding by explaining how later chapters explore these themes.