The Relation of Vocational Training to Academic Education

The traditional approach to education advocates a dichotomy between vocational training and academic education. Some scholars contend that the knowledge which resides in minds of individuals is more valuable than hands-on skills, whereas their opponents argue that academic education incorporates abstract concepts which are of little practical use. In the present article, an attempt is made to scrutinize liberal education and vocationalism. The results indicate that the two worlds of practical and conceptual endeavors are less distant than they may seem, and these simplistic views of education and training are the result of considering education and training as polar extremes. At one end of the continuum is devaluing vocational training and its exclusion from tertiary education; at the other end is pure vocationalism with no development of the mind. Accordingly, the proposed approach in this paper is a synthetic one which favors integration of practical and theoretical components in any type of education, prioritizes theoretical knowledge, and supports incorporating more academic content in vocational courses.