On Instantly Consumable Knowledge and Snake Oil

Abstract

Fewer terms have given rise to more controversy, nor fuelled and inspired so many contemporary policies in higher education, than the category of'the vocational'. That it has caused such heat without over much light is scarcely surprising since it has lain at the basis of most Western European educational thought, not to mention ways of classifying and training the different social strata, since the days of Plato and the Greek philosophers. Thus, the distinction between knowledge and 'useful' knowledge remains ever green across the centuries, as does, of course, the battle between the Faculties: between those which rest their identity on the basis of paradigms of scholarship and originality, defined internally by the knowledge that has accumulated around them, and those Faculties which define themselves primarily in relation to the immediate application, practice and relevance their knowledge has for ensuring their diplomates get jobs in that exact sector of the economy which demands the skills their study has engendered. But social or for that matter economic and industrial relevance tends to embody precisely that quality which its adepts identify in the 'pure' disciplines. There is an in-built element of obsolescence. Indeed, what often started out as yesterday's relevant field of study becomes today's knowledge in process of 'purification' in keeping with the gradual and in some cases, not so gradual detachment of knowledge constructed around an occupation to a corpus of knowledge that exists independently of the occupation to which it once led. One has only in this respect to think of the field of sociology, deemed in its earliest forms as a tool in the art of government and social planning, and to consider its present condition to see how swift this process of detachment is. Even those fields which have grown up from a pragmatic empirical base and enshrine a goodly measure of 'folk knowledge' midwifery, pre-school infant teaching or social work, for example (Bergendahl, 1983; Johansson, 1981, p. 4; Elzinga er al., 1980, p. 12) seek to generate theory as part of their drive to status for their practitioners and academic legitimacy for their proponents. In short, both the structure and very often the content of what is taught in higher education are successive accumulations of past forms of vocationalism that have developed inside the university whilst the economy that once clamoured for them moves on. In short, the tensions that arise from vocationalism that is, training in the mastery