Synopses & Reviews
Since the 1980s there has been considerable discussion of the vocationalizing of universities in the U.S. Critics see a narrowing of focus to career objectives at the expense of a more broad-based humanities education and the citizenship training necessary to a democracy. There has been much less discussion, however, of the reform initiatives intended to change actual vocational education programs. In its beginnings early in the 20th century vocational education was designed to train a working class for massive industrialization. Influential figures like Charles Prosser insisted on a rigid separation between vocational and academic training. Students were to be taught limited and very job-specific skills. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s in contrast were directed not only at making vocational training more academic in content, but also at transforming the psychology of student expectations toward the idea of middle class careers. This book argues that the complexities of vocational education reform can explain a great deal about how universities have changed. Rather than those paradise lost narratives that target training for jobs as the original sin, the argument is that both vocational education and university education must be understood within a larger context of class formation and structure. The reshaping of class processes signaled by vocational education reform initiatives has altered relations throughout the broad range of postsecondary education institutions, from technical schools to research universities. Thus it becomes especially important for those of us teaching in the humanities to understand significant structural shifts that affect our fields. As continuallydwindling cultural capital fails to sustain fields like literary study, the role of the humanities becomes increasingly managerial. Humanities faculty are positioned to manage, assess, and ultimately attempt to contain the often contradictory effects imposed by the educational production of labor in the terms required by class formation.
Review
"A crucial new work from one of our leading theorists."
Review
No, classes haven't disappeared in the United States. But they certainly don't operate the way they did 150 or even 50 years ago. In this original and timely book, noted scholar and teacher Evan Watkins uses vocational education as a lens to focus on the dramatic changes that are currently taking place in the areas of work, choice, and higher education, which have led to new processes of class formation. He also shows how, if we challenge the assumptions about the magic of the economy, those of us who work in postsecondary education--including, and perhaps especially, the humanities--have a unique opportunity to use where we are to bring into being a social world without exploitation.EMAIL IF CHANGING -David F. Ruccio
One of America's foremost scholars of work, class, and education at the top of his game.-Catherine Prendergast
A crucial new work from one of our leading theorists.-Jeffrey Nealon
Synopsis
A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to cool outexpectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization.In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing. Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a cooling outto a heating upof class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism. The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from beat the oddsof long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds.Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.
About the Author
EVAN WATKINS is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of
Class Degrees: Smart Work, Managed Choice, and the Transformation of Higher Education (Fordham);
Everyday Exchanges: Marketwork and Capitalist Common Sense;Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education; and Work Time: English Departments and the
Circulation of Cultural Value.