Relationships between General and Vocational Education

The emergence of vocational education, which is a consequence of schools being made responsible for occupational training, has resulted in the problem of relationship between general education and vocational education becom ing topical. The content of education in vocational schools consists of two components, viz. general and vocational. Changes in the social functions of vocational scholing involve changes not only in the content of education, but also the relationship between its components: general education was subordinated to the requirements of vocational education; the two components were regarded as autonomous, unrelated with each other; general education was to be polytechnicized and thus, on the plane of applications, brought close to vocational education; permeation of the two components in a common nucleus is looked for.
Educational systems in other countries usually separate general education from vocational education in time or institutionally or they separate the functions of the two components of education. In those systems, therefore, the problem of the relationship of general and vocational education is of a different character than in the Czechoslovak education system.
In order to underline the correlation between general and vocational education the syllabuses in general education subjects for vocational schools use three different means: specific teaching material differentiated according to the requirements of the vocational component of education, alternative blocks of teaching material, and variants of syllabuses.
It is imperative, however, to proceed further and to push through, in educating pupils of secondary vocational training centres and pupils of secondary vocational schools, a comprehensive conception of the content of education in which the dividing line between general education and vocational education disappears. In order to put this conception fully into effect it is necessary to create conditions for it by means of analysing social requirement concerning education and by means of analysing educational potentialities of the contents of both general and vocational education. The conception of a comprehensively conceived content of education must also respect the real learning capacities of secondary shool pupils.