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Towards an international comparative history of vocational education and training

Historical approaches are not a major focus of contemporary VET research. When we launched the Call for Papers for this Special Issue on the history of VET, we were not sure how many proposals and what kind of topics or country studies we would receive. Therefore, we were surprised that we got impressive 30 potential contributions with topics that included the history of ideas about vocational education, trajectories of concepts such as competences and skills and studies on social inequality and the role of VET to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, the most common feature of papers was the focus on the development of VET as a system. A further commonality was that none of the proposed articles reached back beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, most proposals stretched their focus to include the situation of VET today. Although there is no strong tradition of historical approaches in the VET research community, our intention with this historical issue is based on the conviction that to understand the development and situation of VET within societies, it is important to perceive and analyse changes within a longer perspective. The aim of the articles in this issue is to offer answers to the question about why VET systems developed as they did. So, we can say that the trajectory of VET systems is always embedded within a narrative of gradual change. Some would call this evolution or even modernisation. In any case, VET in its modern form, which includes schools and with them a public and political dimension, was established and developed under the shaping influence of the respective cultural, political and socio-economic national conditions of individual countries.