The Cult of Resilience and Sustainability or The Crisis of Human Emancipation: Exploration and Analytical Inferences of nowadays VET through the lens of Marcuse’s Critical Theory
This article critically examines the prevailing utilitarian orientation of Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the discourse of resistance and sustainability that impose a cult of Vocationalism through the lens of Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory. It explores how the systemic influence of technological rationality, reinforced by marketdriven imperatives, stabilize steadily a conformist, one-dimensional society that suppresses critical consciousness and human emancipation. Centralizing on key concepts such as false needs, reification, and repressive tolerance, the analysis reveals how current VET practices often serve to reproduce systemic domination under the well-intentioned guise of neutrality, resilience, sustainability and efficiency. The article appeals for a transformative reimagining of VET—one that moves beyond instrumental skills to profoundly cultivate critical reflection, democratic engagement, and human dignity. The integration philosophical and ethical inquiry into curricula, promoting learner agency, and encouraging normative questioning of technological and societal systems, a liberatory and purified of cliché model of VET can be realized—aimed not solely at labour market integration but at breeding autonomous individuals capable of remodelling the shape of a more just and realistically sustainable future.