From the Enlightenment to vocational Bildung

This chapter extends our discussion of how an education that fully acknowledges the personhood of vocational students might advance social justice, examining theories developed in 19th- and 20th-century Germany. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s neo-humanistic theory of Bildung distinguished its rationale from enlightenment pedagogy by placing the individual at the centre of education. In the conditions of the time, this appeared to imply the exclusion of vocational spaces and students from the possibility of Bildung . A century later, in a unified and rapidly industrialising Germany, Georg Kerschensteiner developed a theory of vocational Bildung that drew variously on Humboldtian and hermeneutic perspectives, adapting them to the purposes of his own vocational education project. Whilst this theory has mainly been criticised for its adaptation to the authoritarian state and its distance from contemporary realities, it raises central issues about the possibility of a vocational education that takes us beyond contemporary skills discourse.