Conference Agenda

Postwar societies experienced a period associated with an economic boom, far-reaching social, cultural, and political upheaval. Across many Western societies, traditional authority structures – whether rooted in racial segregation, patriarchal norms, or hierarchical political institutions – faced unprecedented challenges. Mass movements championed ideals of equality, justice, and self-determination, calling for liberation, peace, and participatory democracy. Simultaneously, however, many societies saw the rise of conservative counter-movements, alongside economic recession and high unemployment. This period of economic boom and recession, progressive thinking and conservative resistance has been labeled as the “long sixties” and “long seventies”. The tension between reform and restoration, progress and perseverance also shaped VET. Within this context of tension, VET underwent significant reforms, aiming to respond to rapidly changing labour markets, democratize education, and foster economic development (Doering-Manteuffel & Raphael 2008; Villaume, Mariager & Porsdam 2016).

In current debates on the evolution of VET systems, scholars often rely on the concept of path dependency (for a critical review see Frommberger & Porcher 2023). Existing literature frequently portrays VET reforms as a linear story of winning ideas, neglecting the ambitious experiments and alternative visions that emerged at the time. While this perspective is valuable, it tends to overlook ideas that were previously expressed, but did not influence the privileged path. By doing so, it overlooks the uncertainties, contestations, and alternative futures that were also present in the past. As a result, researchers often exclude these unrealized or divergent imagined futures – expressed by real actors – from their analyses. Yet, to understand the motives of VET actors from the past and to gain insight into how and why ideas evolved, persisted, or failed in past societies, careful, context-specific examination is needed. Therefore, research on VET reform must move beyond simplified narratives of success and failure to recognize the diverse and contingent pathways of change (e.g. Jorns 2025).

Based on the premise that the history of VET does not follow a narrative of progress, but is rather a contested field of pluralistic visions, the symposium aims to rethink the “long 60s and 70s” by highlighting alternatives and pluralistic visions, thereby critically questioning deterministic research and views of history and contemporary perceptions of reform, education, and society. The papers examine how historical actors negotiated societal expectations, political agendas, and visions of industrial and social progress in relation to VET. By recovering the plural visions and alternative possibilities from the postwar era, the symposium challenges, from a historiographical point of view, deterministic and positivist heuristics that shape narratives obscuring complexity. In historical terms, echoing Edward Thompson’s (1966) emphasis on history as the contested making of social relations, we aim to understand both the “winning” as well as the neglected educational imaginaries. The past will be given back its future, its former openness, its former potential, and its former hope and possibility (Hölscher 2017, 8).

VET is viewed here both as a space for social negotiation about the future (education as a project related to the future) and as a place for producing knowledge about society itself (education as a reflection of society's self-interpretation). The symposium thus helps develop a reflective, historically aware understanding of education and social change. VET is therefore not only a functional system of the economy but also a cultural space in which society debates its own future.

Education policy in the United States is currently in a moment of flux, captured in the shift in postsecondary policy prescriptions from preparing students for an academic future (i.e. “college for all”) to preparing them for a vocational one (e.g. the “skills economy”). This paper builds on recent efforts to challenge this dichotomy (e.g. Groeger 2021; Shelton 2023), replacing the traditional academic/vocational dichotomy with a portrait of career education drawn by the US Office of Career Education in the 1970s. For American policymakers, the seventies was a decade shaped by uncertainty as the US economy faltered, inflation rates surged, and unemployment rose in spite of years of growing investment in education. While some called for a “back to basics” approach to academics and others demanded deeper investment in what was then termed Vocational Education to prepare students for the trades, the newly founded Office of Career Education (OCE) advocated for a third way that resisted easy categorization into academic or vocational frameworks. Theirs was an approach inspired by the era’s burgeoning Career Education Movement, which endeavored to foster a deeper relationship between youth and work (Clark 1992). Under the tenure of its director, Kenneth Hoyt, from 1974 to 1981 the OCE offered an alternative vision of education and development rooted less in the work of economists like Gary Becker, which conceived of young people as vessels for human capital, and more influenced by psychologist Paul Baltes’s work on life-span developmental psychology, which saw youth as navigating a series of life stages through which work would be one of many motifs. As this paper explores, the publications produced by OCE addressed the insecurities of the 1970s by advocating for a holistic approach to career education that asked not only how the individual fit into the workforce, but how work fit into the life of the individual. This vision is relevant today as US policymakers once again call for a “back to basics” approach to education on the one hand and a redoubling of investment in workforce development on the other in search of greater social efficiency. Reclaiming this alternative vision of schooling provides not only a more nuanced definition of a career distinct from current American Career and Technical Education (CTE), but helps point the way out—for both historians and policymakers – of our current rigid binaries about the aims of schooling.

Baltes, P. B., Reese, H., & Lipsitt, L. 1980. Life-span developmental psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 31, 65–110. Becker, G. S. 1983. Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education (2nd ed., Midway reprint). University of Chicago Press. Clark, D. 1992. Improving workforce preparation: Lessons from the career education movement. NAIEC Newsletter. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED349437.pdf Groeger, C. V. 2021. The education trap: Schools and the remaking of inequality in Boston. Harvard University Press. Labaree, D. 1997. Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 39–81. Malkus, N. 2019. The evolution of career and technical education: 1982–2013. American Enterprise Institute. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED596295.pdf

“Future plans instead of water cannons,” chanted young people in 1968. These young people—including those in vocational training – were referring to plans to purchase water cannons in the aftermath of the so-called “Globus riot”, the confrontation between young protesters and police in Zurich. A protest, in which VET youth were involved (Peter 2008; Eigenmann & Geiss 2016). My analysis examines how these young people – more precisely, apprentices in the postwar era (1945–1989) – imagined the future of vocational education and training (VET) to bring about a desired future or prevent an undesired one. Apprentices in Switzerland play a central role in shaping the societal future – three-quarters of young people who form future society complete VET (Kessler & Ruoss 2024). VET, furthermore, lies at the intersection of politics, economics, labor, technology, society, and education. Future imaginings of VET constitute and are constituted by the social imaginary, that is, the shared practices and widely accepted meanings that structure collective life (Taylor 2004, 24). Nevertheless, their marginalized voices have not been heard in contemporary debates, have seldom been traced, and have rarely been considered in historical research. Whether and how imaginings of future VET functioned as critical interventions with utopian potential or as stabilizing forces within this social imaginary remains unexplored. To address this, I investigate how apprentices imagined the future and the future social imaginary, and what role they assigned to VET in realizing their visions. Methodologically, I understand the formulation of future imaginings as a form of future-oriented action: although futures are by definition imagined, they guide perception and behavior in the present. In German-speaking Switzerland, “1968” is primarily associated with the aforementioned Globus riots in Zurich (Skenderovic & Späti 2012, 5). Zurich, therefore, represents the research area for this study. I define the postwar period (1945–1989) as the analytical frame, as the future became a central category of human action after 1945, with imagination playing an increasingly prominent role. Using Zurich’s VET youth as a case, I reconstruct and analyze apprentices’ future imaginaries from apprentice magazines, leaflets, and lecture transcripts. In doing so, I show that imaginings of the future constitute a form of social action, revealing VET not only as a training model but also as a site of social change. My contribution thus serves as an example of how VET can be analyzed as a space of social projection.

Eigenmann, P., & Geiss, M. (2016). There is no outside to the system: Paternalism and protest in Swiss vocational education and training, 1950–1980. Studies in Vocational and Continuing Education (Bern), (14), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0343-2354-3 Kessler, S., & Ruoss, T. (2024). Bildung, Beruf und Boom: Lehrvertragsstatistiken und die Expansion der Berufsbildung in der Schweiz, 1930–1970. Zeitschrift für Berufs- und Wirtschaftspädagogik (ZBW). Franz Steiner Verlag. https://doi.org/10.25162/zbw-2024-0011 Peter, N. (2008). Halbstarke, Kellerpoeten, Studentinnen und Lehrlinge. In J. Scharloth & A. Linke (Eds.), Der Zürcher Sommer 1968: Zwischen Krawall, Utopie und Bürgersinn. NZZ Libro. Skenderovic, D., & Späti, C. (2012). Die 1968er-Jahre in der Schweiz: Aufbruch in Politik und Kultur. Hier + Jetzt. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries (3rd ed., Public Planet Books). Duke University Press.

International typologies of vocational education invariably cast England in the role of a narrow, market-led vocationalism, derived by a direct path from its nineteenth century origins (Greinert 2010). Yet such characterisation overlooks the educational struggles that shaped Britain’s further education and skills sector during the ‘Long 1960s’ and ‘Long 1970s’, with their succeeding waves of liberalisation and vocationalisation. In this paper, we review the significance of this contestation for the conceptualisation of vocational provision in English-speaking countries. The Long 1960s are widely noted for the introduction of ‘liberal’ or ‘general’ studies as a mandatory, more cultural complement to the curriculum of technical colleges. The aims, curriculum and staffing of this provision was at most loosely connected to the mainstream technical curriculum. Proposals to integrate these activities with the technical mainstream included the 1969 Haselgrave Report (Bailey & Unwin 2008). This period is still celebrated as an example of an alternative imagining of vocational education (Huddleston & Unwin 2023; Patel 2024; Simmonds 2016) but also reflects wider liberalising tendencies with the post-school ‘further education’ sector. By the 1980s, these developments had been decisively reversed. Greater policy emphasis on the economic aims of education centred the discussion around Haselgrave on employer control of vocational education (e.g. Nature 1970). Outcomes-based education and competency-based assessment dominated the full-time provision for the young unemployed that exploded during the collapse of manufacturing employment in the late 1970s and 1980s. The removal of colleges from local government control to become ‘further education corporations’ in 1992 crowned linked processes of marketisation and vocationalisation. These two periods can be seen as alternative imaginings of the sector that go far beyond mere changes of government, notwithstanding the election of Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. They form part of broader educational developments in Britain, including comprehensive schooling and the creation of polytechnics as an alternative higher education route during the 1960s and the imposition of a neoliberal order throughout the UK’s public sector. The ‘new vocationalism’ of colleges, which also affected schooling, drew on much older traditions of narrow vocationalism, whilst sustaining a strong academic-vocational divide (Hickox & Moore 1995). These findings suggest that a static understanding of vocationalism, reinforcing the notion that there is no alternative to competency-based training for the majority of young people on vocational pathways, understates the possibilities of alternative futures and broader conceptualisations of education on vocational pathways in England and other English-speaking countries.

Bailey, B., & Unwin, L. 2008. Fostering ‘habits of reflection, independent study and free inquiry’: an analysis of the short‐lived phenomenon of General/Liberal Studies in English vocational education and training. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 60(1), 61–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820701828861 Esmond, B., Kaur, B., & Atkins, L. 2025. Enrichment in colleges after COVID: spaces for agency and/or cultural reproduction. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 77(1), 121–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2024.2393105 Greinert, W.-D. 2010. Governance models of training for employment: A European perspective. Research in Comparative and International Education, 5(3), 1–10. 251–260. https://doi.org/10.2304/rcie.2010.5.3.251 Hickox, M., & Moore, R. 1995. Liberal‐Humanist Education: the vocationalist challenge. Curriculum Studies, 3(1), 45–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965975950030103 Huddlestone, P. & Unwin, L. 2024. Curriculum in FE Colleges Over Time: Illustrations of Change and Continuity. Edge Foundation. https://www.edge.co.uk/documents/475/Edge_History_of_FE_curriculum_final.pdf Nature 1970. Haslegrave under Fire. Nature 226, 995. https://doi.org/10.1038/226995a0 Patel, J. 2024. General/Liberal Studies in English Further Education: The Rise and Fall of a Radical Programme to Balance General and Technical Education, c1957–1980. Edge Foundation. https://www.edge.co.uk/research/learning-from-the-past/learning-from-the-past-papers/ Simmons, R. 2016. Liberal studies and critical pedagogy in further education colleges: ‘where their eyes would be opened’ (sometimes). Oxford Review of Education, 42(6), 692–706. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2016.1226790