Will moving maritime education and training from vocational to academic improve competence at sea?
 Bureaucratic activism, viewed as the solution to most everything, has its fierce advocates in the area of seafarer competency today.
They are bent on making it harder to achieve the Seafarers Training, Certification and Watchkeeping (STCW) by transforming from practical task-oriented training into a university degree programme.
Such is the view of the author of an extended article advocating such a change in Sweden's WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs, of Malmo, across the strait from Copenhagen.
"Traditional seafarer training has always focused on the acquisition and use of practical skills. The prevailing view is that, while this approach addresses a degree of cognitive skills, it focuses on, and gives much more emphasis to the acquisition of hands-on practical skills for the performance of specific tasks," says the paper by Michael Ekow Manuel.
"On the other hand, academic education has been seen to be much more focused on the development of in-depth analytical and critical thinking skills; cognitive skills that are less reliant on hands-on training, but stresses critical reading and discussion.
The global trend in maritime education and training is increasingly to link an essentially vocational education that provides specific and restricted competence with more general or deeper academic components leading to an academic qualification," Mr Manuel said.
"This trend has led to some dilemmas for curriculum development, for training legislation in a global industry, and for achieving desired learning outcomes in the shipping industry," he said.
The paper goes on to say that seamanship today is a more intellectual exercise than it was even 20 years ago. Today paper charts have largely been displaced by electronic chart display information systems (ECDIS). Still there is nothing in this development however revolutionary that makes the training any less vocational or more academic. Journalists did not have to go for re-training with the advent of the computer. Its introduction was handled through on-the-job training with a minimum of IT hand-holding.
The desire for an operational upgrade on the part of academics appears to be a plan to assume control over maritime education and training. As vocational instructors are of lower rank than academics, it will be the academic who will determine if seafarer graduates with their STCW certificates having to please a new set of masters they had nothing to do with before.
As defined in the Oxford dictionary “academic” in its adjectival form relates to “education and scholarship” and places “greater emphasis on reading and study than on technical or practical work”.
Mr Manuel hardly conceals his intention, noting that that "in its original religious form therefore, university education in the western context was an agent for social change."
He said it addressed fundamental issues that could be said to encompass all of human interests and forms of inquiry, ranging from questions about the natural world to those of psyche, existentiality and being.
"It was a 'liberal education' that focused on the development of the intellect for its own sake. However, those who subscribe to a 'philosophy of utility' have always challenged this idea of a university," he said.
"With respect to needed social change, whether in a global, industry, or national context, higher education is both the product and source of change. Universities, by their nature, address this social change via 'higher education.' While over the years, there have been shifting conceptions of the focus of higher education; one consistent thought has been that it cultivates intellectual prowess and deductive reasoning skills. In the words of one very early inquirer into the essence of the university, 'it (the university) contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it'
In moving towards his ultimate goal, Mr Manuel continues: "Because the maritime industry is part and parcel of a global society that has been marked by remarkable change, it has had to adapt and offer to its trainees this mixed approach to higher education in its specific context.
"The need to offer this approach is also influenced by the changing perceptions of individual trainees/students (and their sponsors) as to what they want and/or can make out of their lives. It is increasingly uncommon to find a young person who considers a life at sea as a life-long career. Furthermore, increasing sophistication of technology on ships, greater emphasis on the safety of ships and their crew, and stricter requirements for sustainable environmental practice, all contribute to the need to consider this mixed approach," he wrote.
"It would then appear that the rigid distinction between academic and vocational education is a false dichotomy, at least as it relates to professional maritime work in the 21st century that requires life-long learning. The perceived differences between vocational and academic education have been exaggerated. If a comparison is made between these educational approaches, it would be recognised that the fundamental difference between vocational and academic approaches lies in the degree of specificity.
"Academic inquiry is a generalist approach to critical thinking skills, while vocational education ideally focuses such thinking on more specific professional ends. The basis of critical thinking need not be absent from either one. Any differences in interrogating these approaches should therefore be in respect of the levels at which knowledge and skills are in approaches, rather than the isolating of skills for vocational, and knowledge for academics.
"This merged approach, which incorporates the possibility of gaining the relevant Certificates of Competency along with academic qualifications, addresses the evolving social and career goals of contemporary seafarers and assures them of the possibility of a long-term career development while addressing industry-level needs," said the article.
Having absorbed Mr Manuel's thesis, one is compelled to ask "cui bono" - who benefits? Perhaps the seafarer in some distant philosophical way will benefit, perhaps when he leaves seafaring, an eventuality foreseen by Mr Manuel. This might lead him on to higher degrees, and thus more business for academic education providers, Perhaps if the education provided with combining the vocational with the academic came with a post application of a system of key performance indicators, as is de rigueur in the shipping industry generally with on-time indices, the possibility might be explored at a later date.
But on the face of it, moving maritime education and training from its vocational role to an academic role chiefly benefits the teacher rather than the students as they will likely be forced into system that requires them to do much more than they bargained for to get a licence to work. |
