Vocationalism in Higher Education: The Triumph of the Education Gospel

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a widely circulated Education Gospel has achieved worldwide influence. Communicating the good word about education, the Gospel's essential vision goes something like this: The Knowledge Revolution (or the Information Society, or the Communications Revolution, or the High-Tech revolution) has changed the nature of work, shifting away from occupations rooted in industrial production to occupations associated with knowledge and information. This transformation has both increased the skills required for new occupations and updated the three R's, driving work skills in the direction of "higher-order" skills including communications skills, problem solving, and reasoning-the "skills of the twenty-first century."