1.​ I think it is easier to define vocational education because topics in that branch of
education tend to be the one that comes to mind first. Vocational education is the
education that directly relates to and prepares students for jobs that they might have in
the future. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) falls under this branch of
education. It is typically considered essential to contributing towards global economic
competitiveness. Civic education, on the other hand, is education that relates to topics
outside of this vocational type. It is not meant to necessarily prepare someone for a job
in the same way that vocational education is meant to. It teaches people what they can
do as citizens, and how to properly participate in democratic processes. It usually
encompasses the liberal arts.
2.​ She makes the distinction that analyzing what equality (and by proxy, inequality) is
depends on what paradigm you analyze it from. If you’re looking at it from a vocational
paradigm, the only relevant equality is economic, and political equality doesn’t matter.
The thing is that these two equalities are directly related. Economic inequality is directly
a result of years and years of political choices, so a change in our current political
equality would also change the state of our economic equality.
3.​ Education, particularly liberal arts, directly prepares us for democratic participation and
strengthens our civic agency. Through specific types of studies, we become better at
analyzing and understanding our government, what they’re supposed to do for us, and
how to fix it if they don’t help us. Through things like history, economics, math, and
sciences, we can properly make judgments about past history and what role our
government played in them; with philosophy, literature, and religion and its history, we
can properly decide on what should be important to us and everyone else regarding our
safety and happiness (as is stated in the Declaration of Independence); we need to learn
the art of conversation and prophetic speech to relay these ideas, and to exercise these
arts we need literature, visual arts, film, music, etc.
a.​ She defines civic agency as helping to create some way of life (communal
world-building), and this creation can happen at very small scales, like a
neighborhood, to a global scale.