Disinterested formative schooling is being eliminated in favor of early vocational specialization

Evidence

The tendency today is to abolish every type of schooling that is “disinterested” (not serving immediate interests) or “formative”— keeping at most only a small-scale version to serve a tiny elite of ladies and gentlemen who do not have to worry about assuring themselves of a future career. Instead, there is a steady growth of specialised vocational schools, in which the pupil’s destiny and future activity are determined in advance. A rational solution to the crisis ought to adopt the following lines. First, a common basic education, imparting a general, humanistic, formative culture; this would strike the right balance between development of the capacity for working manually (technically, industrially) and development of the capacities required for intellectual work. From this type of common schooling, via repeated experiments in vocational orientation, pupils would pass on to one of the specialised schools or to productive work. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 329

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Gramsci’s key contrast between ‘disinterested/formative’ education and specialized vocational training — his distinction between creating whole persons versus pre-destining workers.