Neoliberalism and the “Skilling” Myth: How Vocational Education Reinforces Class Hierarchies
OBJECTIVE:
To critique the push for vocational training that tracks Marginalized Students into low-wage labor while reserving Critical Inquiry and leadership roles for the elite.
1. The “Skills Gap” Narrative
We hear it constantly from policymakers and corporate leaders: “India has a skills gap. We have too many graduates with degrees but no skills.” The proposed solution? Vocational Training. We are told we need more plumbers, electricians, and technicians.
Notice who they tell to become plumbers? It’s never the children of the policymakers. It’s always the children of the poor.
This narrative frames “Skilling” as a pragmatic solution to unemployment. But beneath the surface, it is a tool of Social Stratification. It divides the student population into two distinct tracks:
- Track A (The Elite): Liberal Arts, Science, Critical Thinking. Preparation for Leadership.
- Track B (The Masses): Vocational Skills. Preparation for Labor.
This article critiques the Neoliberal Agenda in education, which views the child not as a citizen to be empowered, but as a unit of labor to be fitted into the economy.
2. Analysis: The Two-Track Railway
A. The Bifurcation of Potential
The modern education system operates like a railway switch. At age 14 or 15, a decision is often made—implicitly or explicitly—about a child’s future.
ACADEMIC TRACK
Focus: Theory, Analysis, Policy.
Destiny: Manager / CEO.
VOCATIONAL TRACK
Focus: Obedience, Repetition, Task.
Destiny: Employee / Worker.
The tragedy is that this split correlates almost perfectly with Socio-Economic Status. The rich child who struggles in Math is given a tutor. The poor child who struggles in Math is told, “Maybe you are good with your hands.”
B. Neoliberalism: Education as Job Prep
Neoliberalism redefines the purpose of education. It shifts from “Building Democracy” to “Building the Economy.”
The neoliberal transformation of education represents a fundamental shift in how society values the learner and the classroom. Under this framework, the traditional, humanistic goals of schooling—such as fostering critical thinking, developing a sense of civic responsibility, and encouraging the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—are systematically dismantled. Instead, education is redesigned to serve as a high-speed assembly line for the global labor market. This process is often referred to as the “Vocationalization of the Intellect,” where the primary success metric for a school is no longer the wisdom of its graduates, but their immediate “employability.”
In a neoliberal system, the student is reimagined as “Human Capital.” Every hour spent in the classroom is viewed through the lens of Return on Investment (ROI). This leads to a narrow curriculum that prioritizes quantifiable technical skills (STEM, coding, or specific trade certifications) while dismissing the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences as “unproductive” or “luxury” subjects. For the elite, education remains a space of inquiry and leadership training; however, for the marginalized, neoliberalism offers a “Skilling” model that tracks them into specialized, repetitive labor roles.
This “Job Prep” model functions by stripping education of its subversive potential. When students are taught only how to perform a task to meet a market demand, they lose the intellectual tools necessary to ask why the market is structured this way or who benefits from their labor. By reducing the classroom to a pre-employment training center, the state effectively offloads the cost of corporate training onto the public, while ensuring that the next generation of workers is technically capable but politically passive.
The obsession with job readiness creates a culture of perpetual anxiety. Learning becomes a high-stakes competition where the fear of being “unskilled” or “obsolete” drives students to focus on narrow credentials rather than deep understanding. This neoliberal logic reinforces existing class hierarchies: the wealthy continue to learn how to run the world, while the poor are trained to simply work in it. Ultimately, “Education as Job Prep” is not about empowering the individual; it is about calibrating the human being to fit the existing gears of the economic machine.
C. The “Soft Skills” Trap: A Class Analysis
In the contemporary educational discourse, “Soft Skills” are presented as a neutral, universal set of competencies. We are told that every child, regardless of their background, must possess “Communication,” “Teamwork,” and “Adaptability.” However, when we apply a neoliberal class lens, we discover that Soft Skills are not universal; they are stratified.
The “Trap” lies in the fact that the same vocabulary is used to describe two entirely different sets of behaviors depending on which “track” the student is on. While elite students are taught soft skills as tools for **Dominance**, marginalized students in vocational tracks are taught soft skills as tools for **Submission**.
1. Communication vs. Controlled Speech
In elite private schools, “Communication” is taught as the art of **Persuasion and Negotiation**. Students are encouraged to find their “voice,” to debate authority, and to articulate complex personal visions. It is an expansive skill designed to help the child command a room and influence policy.
The Elite Interpretation
Skill: Strategic Oratory.
Goal: Leading others, closing deals, and navigating high-status social networks.
Action: Challenging the status quo to optimize profit or power.
The Vocational Interpretation
Skill: Customer Service Etiquette.
Goal: Minimizing friction in service interactions and following scripts.
Action: Managing one’s emotions to ensure the comfort of the “Client.”
Conversely, for the marginalized student in a “skilling” center, Communication is reduced to **Functional Politeness**. It is about learning to speak in a way that is non-threatening to management. It is about “English for the Workplace,” which emphasizes following instructions and reporting problems, rather than questioning the structure of the work itself.
2. Teamwork vs. Compliance
The term “Teamwork” in elite circles refers to **Collaborative Leadership**. It is the ability to delegate, to synthesize different opinions, and to drive a group towards a shared objective. It assumes the student will be the manager of the team.
In vocational training, Teamwork often serves as a euphemism for **Compliance**. It is used to discourage individual dissent and to ensure that workers monitor each other’s productivity. Here, being a “good team player” means accepting a heavy workload without complaint because “the team” (the company) depends on it. It is a soft-power mechanism to suppress labor organization and collective bargaining.
3. Adaptability as Precarious Labor Acceptance
Perhaps the most dangerous soft skill in the neoliberal toolkit is “Adaptability.” For the high-level manager, adaptability means the ability to pivot between markets or to adopt new technologies. It is an **Intellectual Agility**.
For the vocational student, adaptability is a code word for accepting **Precarity**. In the gig economy, marginalized workers are told they must be “adaptable” to changing shifts, low wages, and a total lack of job security. If the worker complains about a sudden change in contract, they are labeled as “not adaptable.” Thus, a cognitive trait is weaponized to force the worker to absorb the risks of the market.
4. Emotional Labor: The Final Frontier
Elite education reserves the right to emotional expression for the powerful. Marginalized students, however, are trained in **Emotional Regulation**. They are taught to “smile through the stress,” especially in service and hospitality sectors. This training alienates the student from their own genuine feelings of frustration or injustice, framing these natural reactions as “unprofessional.”
Ultimately, the “Soft Skills” trap ensures that while the elite are equipped with the psychological tools to **Run the World**, the marginalized are given just enough social training to **Fit into the Gears** of that world without grinding them to a halt.
We must demand a “Hard” curriculum for all: one that pairs technical proficiency with the critical inquiry necessary to decode these social traps.
E. John Dewey vs. Social Efficiency
The tension within the “Skilling” myth is not new; it is a century-old battlefield. On one side stands the ghost of John Dewey, the champion of progressive education. On the other stands the Social Efficiency Movement (David Snedden, Charles Prosser), whose DNA powers the modern neoliberal “Skilling” agenda. This is the struggle for the soul of the marginalized learner.
(Hover to shift the balance)
1. The Deweyan Ideal: The Integrated Worker
John Dewey believed that separating vocational training from general education was a form of **Class Warfare**. He argued that if we teach a child only the mechanics of a trade (e.g., how to operate a lathe) without teaching them the history of industry, the science of materials, and the economics of labor, we are essentially training a **Serf**.
For Dewey, vocational education was an opportunity to make academic subjects *real*. A student learning carpentry should learn geometry, botany, and the social impact of deforestation. This creates an Integrated Intelligence. It ensures that the worker can never be reduced to a mere tool of the employer.
The Citizen-Creator
Philosophy: Education as the laboratory of democracy.
Goal: To give every worker the intellectual capital to govern themselves and their industry.
Outcome: A society of thinkers who also do.
The Social Tool
Philosophy: Education as a sorting machine for the economy.
Goal: To fit the individual into a specific “slot” based on perceived utility.
Outcome: A society of doers who do not question.
2. The Efficiency Doctrine: “Fitting” the Child
The Social Efficiency advocates of the early 20th century explicitly rejected Dewey’s idealism. They believed it was “inefficient” to teach “useless” subjects to children destined for manual labor. Their logic was cold and mathematical: **The State should not waste resources teaching poetry to someone who will spend their life in a factory.**
This is the exact logic of modern neoliberalism. When we push for “Short-term Skilling” for rural youth, we are reviving this doctrine. We are saying that their Cognitive Horizon should be limited to the immediate needs of the employer. This is not education; it is Human Calibration.
3. The “Hands without Heads” Crisis
When vocational training wins over Deweyan integration, we create a **Crisis of Agency**. The modern marginalized student is given “hands” (technical skills) but denied the “head” (critical framework). This ensures that they remain trapped in low-wage cycles. If their specific technical skill becomes obsolete due to AI or automation, they lack the broad, critical foundation to adapt. They were trained for a *job*, not for a *career*, and certainly not for *sovereignty*.
Includia Trust’s model seeks to bridge this gap. We believe that Gandhiji’s Nai Talim (Basic Education) was the perfect synthesis of Deweyan thought. It argued that labor is the most powerful site for intellectual inquiry. In Nai Talim, the spinning wheel was not just a tool for cloth; it was a tool for learning physics, history, and the politics of colonialism.
The Revolutionary Synthesis
We must reject the false choice between being “Skilled” and being “Educated.” A truly democratic education system provides:
1. Technical Excellence: The pride of the craft.
2. Theoretical Depth: The science behind the work.
3. Critical Awareness: The sociology of the labor market.
The goal of education is not to help the child fit into the world as it is, but to empower the child to build the world as it should be.
3. Conclusion: Reclaiming Dignity
We are not arguing that vocational skills are bad. Plumbing, coding, and farming are vital, dignified pursuits.
The problem is the Segregation.
The Vision:
- Universal Critical Thinking: The plumber should read Shakespeare. The doctor should know how to fix a fuse.
- Destigmatize Labor: Manual labor should be part of the elite curriculum (like Gandhiji’s Nai Talim), not just a dumping ground for the poor.
- End Tracking: Keep all options open for all children until adulthood.
Let us build an education system that serves the Human Being, not just the Human Resource.
REFERENCES & READING
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