Essay on A Liberal Arts versus Vocational Education

A Liberal Arts versus Vocational Education In his book Black Leadership, Marable describes what we will refer to as the Tuskegee phenomenon, in which he asserts Booker T. Washington’s favoring of just this type of â€Å"quick fix† vocational education to be erroneous. Over the next few pages, I will examine Marable’s arguments and I will attempt to extend their application into society as we know it today. Marable describes the Tuskegee approach to black development as political â€Å"racial accommodation.† He details a vocational education completely devoid of encouraging critical thinking. He writes, â€Å"†¦it (Tuskegee) took the social and cultural transformation of the black Southern labor force to be a major responsibility of black†¦show more content†¦Now I will examine certain parallels between the vocational training of the Tuskegee Institute of Washington’s day as described by Marable and compare them with a vocational education available today in what I call â€Å"the Heald Phenomenon.† The first parallel we will examine can be found on TV. Television is bombarded with commercials advertising schools offering vocational training. The overwhelming majority of these commercials feature non-white actors and so it becomes fairly apparent that the advertisers’ target demographic is non-whites. A visit to a local Heald campus confirms this inference - The majority of the students who attend these vocational schools are disproportionately non-whites. To what do we owe this paradigm? It cannot be the racialism of a hundred years ago to whom we owe this segregation. Could it be a voluntary separation of whites from non-whites? Hopefully it’s not that either. Today’s segregation no longer exists in Jim Crow laws and lynchings – they exist in marketing techniques, gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement. As I looked around the Heald classroom I noticed that the students were dressed so professionally. All male students were dressed in shirts and ties. All female students were dressed in office attire. It turns out this is the school’s policy. Students must dress in professional attire in order for them to become accustomed to proper dress in the business world. This seems eerily reminiscent of Marable’sShow MoreRelatedA Liberal Education Matters By Michael S. Roth1067 Words   |  5 PagesA Liberal Education Matters Liberal education- its relevancy and practicality- is a relevant topic; it is especially relevant in a day and age where college is not a leisure but a necessity. 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