Aims to rescue a usable interpretation of the vocational theory in higher education by describing the historical and policy frameworks of the debate.

The book explores the changing patterns of higher education in England in the 20th century, the types of institutions and the emergence of a 'system'. At the same time it traces the relationship between the writer-advocates of higher education and the changing world of higher education and its contexts. There is therefore an interrelated story of higher education, the writers, their messages, their backgrounds and ideologies, the audiences they intend to address, and the impacts of the state and other external forces.

Education was a critical focus of the "war on poverty" declared by President Johnson in 1964. U.S. policy built on research, and experiments being conducted in the early 1960s produced major programs such as the preschool Head Start and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1965. In this major transatlantic study two senior educationalists examine both these developments and similar processes in Britain--notably the Plowden report of 1967. The Silvers examine the shift of attention in Britain from social class and the secondary school to poverty and the primary and preschool stage, and...