Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Education Studies: Experience and Innovation (ICESEI 2022)

In the cause of educational reform, especially the issuance of the “Guidance Program for Training Skilled Talents in Shortage in Vocational Colleges” in 2004, China's higher education encounters two embarrassments: (1) The shift of focus from knowledge imparting to “work process” skill training in general undergraduate education is easy to cause simply vocational education and fall into the state of “neither being vocational nor general”; (2) Training talents for enterprises is either over-educated or mismatch the post of enterprises. The work process system can serve a dose of medicine: originated theoretically from Dewey's Educational Psychology, and practically from the mode of vocational education curriculum in Germany. This study reviews the system from longitudinal logic analysis in terms of the origin, evolution and development in China. The article starts from the perspectives of education development, analyzes in depth the ideological evolution of the work process system, and the difficulties in acclimation in China, and ideas on the settlements of those difficulties. Some inductive and deductive methods are used in reasoning. Some horizontal comparisons are also adopted when analyzing the different regimes and governance modes between China and Germany. The results show that the work process system has roughly experienced three stages in China: introduction, absorption and trial, and improvement and innovation. However, vocational education in China presents the new characteristics of the application transformation of local undergraduate colleges and universities, and the competition-like design of work tasks all determine that it is difficult for the theory to integrate and adapt to the short run in China. In addition to improving scientific structural design, China should combine the application-oriented transformation and development of local undergraduate colleges with the reform of secondary vocational education, and then improve and enrich the structure of the three-dimensional development model and assessment system. The “craftsman training” philosophy oriented by the working process serves the reform of China's higher education and the high-quality development of China's economy.