Transvaluing: The Humanities in a Technical-Vocational Curriculum
"Vocationalism" has become a threatening term for humanities instructors experiencing a gradual erosion of students and course offerings as their institutions devote funds and administrative attention to implementing or expanding technical-vocational programs designed for career students primarily concerned with successfully competing in the job market. The result is a crisis in humanistic studies as higher education and, perhaps, an entire society lapse into the "technical barbarism" Burton Clark [1] foresaw some years ago. Crossing campus from the machine shop to the academic classrooms the career student is moving between alien environments, and discussing the beauty of Shakespeare's sonnets with a group of students wearing grimy blue coveralls can be a very discomfiting experience. Somehow we expect these career students to carry the values generated in a literature or humanities class back to the machine shop; but no provision is made for this transfer of value, no strategy exists to create a holistic system of humanistic value and the work ethic. Creating this system and developing teaching methods to bring about a transfer of value between humanistic education and career training are the principal challenges confronting humanities instructors at an increasingly large number of institutions. Although humanists confidently assert that studying the humanities