One of the most crucial topics in settling educational goals and designing educational courses is to discover an appropriate balance between vocational education and liberal education. Of this topic, the two representative English utilitarian theorist...
One of the most crucial topics in settling educational goals and designing educational courses is to discover an appropriate balance between vocational education and liberal education. Of this topic, the two representative English utilitarian theorists, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill presented extremely opposite views. In his work Chrestomathia which were purported to suggest a curriculum for grammar schools, the former insisted the exclusion of almost all studies of humanities and placed science and technology related courses all over the curriculum. On the contrary, the latter claimed to rule out vocational education in universities and emphasized liberal education centered on humanities. In this paper, I will attempt to present that their different views on the educational topic rely on their different notions of human happiness and those different aspects of human beings to which they paid attention, and then to find out the implication of their views upon the today’s problem of how to integrate and balance vocational education and liberal education.