Culture and VET-An outdated connection?

Although vocational education has become high on the agenda of policymakers and researchers, it is dominated by economist conceptions of education, occupation and work. At the same time, concerns about the challenges of environmental degradation, social and economic inequalities and forced migration remain marginal in the agenda. In this chapter, it will be considered whether one reason for the negligence is the waned interest in the connection of culture and vocational education both among researchers and policymakers. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the VET and Culture-research network has provided a platform for alternative approaches to economist conceptions of vocational education. However, the argument of this chapter is that due to the compromise with the mainstream and the loss of the original interest in concepts and connections of culture and vocational education, the network may have lost its alternative potential. While this chapter is partly identity and memory work, related to the VET and Culture-network, it also aims at showing the urgency of research on vocational education as a cultural phenomenon in the current era of the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene. The revisiting of basic concepts of economy, occupation and work from planetary perspective, as components of the earth-economy and the earth-work, could lead to new research designs, where the analysis of vocational education should be opened and extended to other forms of education, because of its critical contribution to the future of the cultural evolution.