At the sixth annual meeting of the Chinese Association for Vocational Education (Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyushe, CAVE) in 1923, the German engineer Bernhard Berrens (1880–1927) was enthusiastically received as he glorified vocational education as a panacea to the troubled Chinese nation. His audience shared his belief in vocational education as the key to restoring the grandeur of their homeland in the face of foreign aggression. In advocating vocational education, Chinese educators joined a global movement that promised a strong state and stable society made up of diligent citizens participating in flourishing industrial production and economic growth. While renewed attention to vocational education emerged in response to the social and economic effects of industrialization, the related discourses also stirred up much older and more fundamental questions about the role of the individual in society, the relationship between state and citizen, and the causes of social inequalities. At the core of these issues was the question of whether manual labor was a necessary evil or a virtue. Were vocational skills simply a means of earning daily bread, or would a handicraft also cultivate the productive minds of elites?. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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