Vocational Education and Training in Schools and ‘Really Useful Knowledge'

In chronicling the origins of radical education in the United Kingdom between 1790 and 1848, Richard Johnson (1979) invoked the idea of ‘really useful knowledge’ as a way of distancing educative or transformative ideologies from the processes of capitalist schooling and related forms of ‘subjection', ‘servility', ‘slavery’ and ‘surveillance’ (or ‘useless knowledge') (1979: 78). He identified four key aspects of radical education that are pertinent to this chapter. First, it involved a critique of all forms of ‘provided’ education including both state and religious. In other words, radical education was strongly oppositional and revolved around ‘a contestation of orthodoxies’ ...