[4] Several specific elements of the Act contributed to the isolation of vocational education from other parts of the comprehensive high school curriculum.
The 1917 Act was virtually silent on manpower projections and on centralized assignment of training quotas to school districts.
Some critics infer that the authorities saw programs of practical instruction so endangered from a dominant academic elite that they required such protection by Federal law.
Predictably, vocational teachers emphasized job-specific skills to the almost complete exclusion of theoretical content.
The policies and positions taken by the United States Congress in their enactment of Smith-Hughes have been extraordinarily powerful forces in determining the current status of vocational education.
Remarkably, these central segregating and separating provisions have proven to be largely impervious to change in spite of the large-scale shifts in emphasis which have occurred since its original enactment.
A collateral Federal effort was the Rural War Production Training Act which emphasized agriculture related programs.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the program of vocational education which had developed in the early 1900s from the need to "train boys and girls for work", envisioned as national defense strategy in the 1920s, focused on unemployment in the 1930s, now encountered both the need to assist with the war effort during the 1940s, and the need to provide a transition to a peace-time economy.
During this period and into the 1960s, States experienced first the burgeoning of industry related to the war effort, and later, growth in the junior college system and adult education.
The first amendment, Title II, Vocational Education in Practical Nursing, was a reflection of a Congressional interest in "the health of the people".
Several years later, Title VIII sought to stimulate technical training programs in the wake of the launching of Sputnik.
It is surprising to note that almost 50 years after the Smith–Hughes Act, in spite of all the intervening changes, the definition and purpose of vocational education as set out in the new VEA remained largely the same.
Its matching requirements had generated hundreds of millions of additional State and local funds all devoted to vocational education programs.
Additionally, the academic research community has shown scant interest to the issues facing vocational education.
Because the Federal purposes in vocational education appeared to coincide so closely with the wishes of the vocational education community, i.e., to protect and expand practical training in secondary schools in the United States against the assumed opposition of the academic elite, the Federal acts were, practically speaking, self-enforcing.