Despite the ready admission of historians of the subject that "education" encompasses far more than schools, families, churches, apprenticeships, and other institutions there is no reliable, general account of why schools, especially "academically" oriented ones, have become so cardinal to the U.S. way of life. This paper argues that credentialing, not education, explains the prominence of the school on the U.S. social-cultural landscape. The paper contends that, in many parts of the world, the workplace remains an unambiguous place of learning, and finds that Germany is among the most interesting, for German shops, factories, and offices do not function as education and training sites in the absence of schools, but as explicit, historically constructed alternatives to schools. Whatever the German educational system's relative merits, however, its great advantage, for the purpose of this paper, is the way its evolution and operation problematize received historiographic accounts of U.S. educational development. The paper states that German educational practice makes it clear that the U.S. propensity to identify education with schooling is not universal. The paper asks why vocational education in the U.S. context has been so ineffectual. It suggests that what counts as education in a society is less a product of where or how it is acquired than of the institutions that define and document it. Contains a table of data and a 60 references. (BT)