Clarification And Enlightenment

Chinese vocational education is undergoing changes from scale development to quality improvement, and the key is to import humanism for reform and development. Historical development of U.S. vocational education has always manifested the idea of humanism, taking care of individual needs. That notion is spread even more widely in contemporary American vocational education. On this basis, the purpose of the study is to investigate the historical and current practice of U.S. humanistic vocational education, and to extract from it experience, which is a very important guiding light, for China’s implement of humanism in its development of vocational education.Qualitative methods are used in this study includes literature, document, interview, observation and comparison, which are based on the epistemology of constructivism and methodologies of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Qualitative literature research provides a detailed explanation of the theory of humanism. Furthermore, based on the technical route of combinations between historical vertical inspection and current horizontal investigation, and between current overall investigation and individual case probe, the method of literature, interview, observation and document are used to explore the historical and current practice of U.S. humanistic vocational education. Finally, on the ground of experience gained from U.S. humanistic vocational education practice, the comparative method was used to put forward some proposals for the future development of Chinese humanistic vocational education.Based on the theoretical structure consisting of the three dimensions of humanism, that is defending for human being in themselves, pursuing full-development individuals, and constructing democratic practice, summarizations of historical development and current practice of humanism reflected in American vocational education could be made from four aspects, which are defence of the educational right, design of training objective, construction of curriculum, and formation of instruction. Historically, U.S. vocational education has been influenced by Christian humanism before1800, scientific humanism in the19th century, pragmatism at the beginning of the20th century, humanistic psychology in the1960s-1970s, and postmodernism and critical theory since the1980s. These influences are seen in educational right, training objective, curriculum and instruction, and humanism is reflected in it to different extents. Meanwhile, findings from overall investigation and individual case study, both show the four aspects of U.S. humanistic vocational education, which are defending for the educational right of the special groups, designing the full-development objective, constructing the complete curriculum and subjective instruction. Enlightened from the experience in the historical and current practice of U.S. humanistic vocational education, and based on the special national conditions in China, some measures originated from the educational right for everyone, the full-development training objective, the complete curriculum and the subjective instruction which promote the future development of China humanistic vocational education are proposed.