Postwar societies experienced a period associated with an economic boom, far-reaching social, cultural, and political upheaval. Across many Western societies, traditional authority structures – whether rooted in racial segregation, patriarchal norms, or hierarchical political institutions – faced unprecedented challenges. Mass movements championed ideals of equality, justice, and self-determination, calling for liberation, peace, and participatory democracy. Simultaneously, however, many societies saw the rise of conservative counter-movements, alongside economic recession and high unemployment. This period of economic boom and recession, progressive thinking and conservative resistance has been labeled as the “long sixties” and “long seventies”. The tension between reform and restoration, progress and perseverance also shaped VET. Within this context of tension, VET underwent significant reforms, aiming to respond to rapidly changing labour markets, democratize education, and foster economic development (Doering-Manteuffel & Raphael 2008; Villaume, Mariager & Porsdam 2016).

In current debates on the evolution of VET systems, scholars often rely on the concept of path dependency (for a critical review see Frommberger & Porcher 2023). Existing literature frequently portrays VET reforms as a linear story of winning ideas, neglecting the ambitious experiments and alternative visions that emerged at the time. While this perspective is valuable, it tends to overlook ideas that were previously expressed, but did not influence the privileged path. By doing so, it overlooks the uncertainties, contestations, and alternative futures that were also present in the past. As a result, researchers often exclude these unrealized or divergent imagined futures – expressed by real actors – from their analyses. Yet, to understand the motives of VET actors from the past and to gain insight into how and why ideas evolved, persisted, or failed in past societies, careful, context-specific examination is needed. Therefore, research on VET reform must move beyond simplified narratives of success and failure to recognize the diverse and contingent pathways of change (e.g. Jorns 2025).

Based on the premise that the history of VET does not follow a narrative of progress, but is rather a contested field of pluralistic visions, the symposium aims to rethink the “long 60s and 70s” by highlighting alternatives and pluralistic visions, thereby critically questioning deterministic research and views of history and contemporary perceptions of reform, education, and society. The papers examine how historical actors negotiated societal expectations, political agendas, and visions of industrial and social progress in relation to VET. By recovering the plural visions and alternative possibilities from the postwar era, the symposium challenges, from a historiographical point of view, deterministic and positivist heuristics that shape narratives obscuring complexity. In historical terms, echoing Edward Thompson’s (1966) emphasis on history as the contested making of social relations, we aim to understand both the “winning” as well as the neglected educational imaginaries. The past will be given back its future, its former openness, its former potential, and its former hope and possibility (Hölscher 2017, 8).

VET is viewed here both as a space for social negotiation about the future (education as a project related to the future) and as a place for producing knowledge about society itself (education as a reflection of society's self-interpretation). The symposium thus helps develop a reflective, historically aware understanding of education and social change. VET is therefore not only a functional system of the economy but also a cultural space in which society debates its own future.

Doering-Manteuffel, A., & Raphael, L. (2008). Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Frommberger, D., & Porcher, C. (2023). On the limited usefulness of comparative politics modelling for understanding VET systems. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 77(3), 728–745. https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2023.2283748 Hölscher, L. (2017). Theoretische Grundlagen der historischen Zukunftsforschung. In L. Hölscher (Ed.), Die Zukunft des 20. Jahrhunderts: Dimensionen einer historischen Zukunftsforschung (pp. 7–38). Campus Verlag. Jorns, K. (2025). Guesswork and the persuasive power of numbers: The production of future knowledge in the Swiss Kneschaurek prospective study with focus on vocational education and training (1971). Paedagogica Historica. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2025.2555509 Thompson, E. P. (1966). The making of the English working class. Vintage Books. Villaume, P., Mariager, R., & Porsdam, H. (2016). Introduction: The “long 1970s”: New perspectives on an epoch-making decade. In P. Villaume, R. Mariager, & H. Porsdam (Eds.), The “long 1970s”: Human rights, East–West détente and transnational relations (pp. 1–11). Routledge.