Meeting Our Enemies: Career Education and The Humanities.

Overview & Synopsis

Career education, as viewed by the Division of Education in Washington, is essentially an instructional strategy aimed at improving educational outcomes by relating all teaching and learning activities to the concept of career development. Although teachers of the humanities may fear that career education is fundamentally anti-intellectual and rejects the humanist tradition, academic skills will not be supplanted by vocational preparation, but instead enriched by relating them to relevant vocational interest. Student motivation will be increased by preparing students either for immediate post-secondary employment or further career preparation. Of the 15 occupational clusters identified for career education curriculums, five are presently being developed at the high school level by leading curriculum specialists. We humanists can elaborate and refine career education as well as benefit from the utilitarian aspects of that concept. At its best, work is a humanity and has a central position in the fashioning of a satisfactory human life. (Author/AG)