Academic in English education is associated with the brain and vocational with the hand. Institutionally, this was played out in traditional class terms with academic higher education (HE) for the professions endorsed by universities over non-academic trade training for manual crafts in colleges of further education (FE). Most of the rest of the world makes no such distinction but talks about ‘tertiary education’, whether at college or university following a pre-vocational general education at primary and secondary school usually up to 18, the age of majority in the USA. Now that England has adopted an Americanised mass tertiary system and FE has been decanted into HE, the traditional divisions have eroded but the old terms are still widely used. This causes confusion, which this chapter clarifies through an historical approach leading to considering the changed contemporary meaning of the words as they are used in today’s very different circumstances. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Brendan Bartram; individual chapters, the contributors.
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