Vocational and technical education and high appreciation of post-secondary education

Darko Štrajn

Summary:   In the age of globalization and high levels of complexity in society, historical paradigms of educational concepts are “translated” into contradictions within school systems. These contradictions are also visible as contradictions within the position of a school system in wider economic and other social systems. Just in an age after reforms of vocational and technical education in 1980s and 1990s, it appeared that a magic device of a solution for the problems of imbalances and contradictions was the “free market” as a component of a doctrine, which is nowadays recognized on a high level of consensus as the neoliberal ideology. Here a hypothesis is devised that individuals and whole social groups take unpredictable decisions in a context of contradictions and social influences within the framework of democracy and relative freedom of choice of career paths, lifestyles and, increasingly, options of choice of different cultural environments. One of the effects of such trends is students’ tendency to invest in the future in the form of gaining higher level education, which implies that vocational and technical education is becoming progressively an institution of vertical educational transition.