Kinda. (I'm assuming you're asking about American education history - I'll defer to others regarding other countries' histories.) It's more accurate to say that vocational training was brought in to supplement American public education than it say it was re-centered.

Since the rise of the American high school in the mid to late 1800s, students have experienced a comprehensive liberal arts curriculum organized around the idea young people benefit from engaging in a number of topics with adults who are experts in those topics. (It's interesting to note that Greek and Latin were still required courses at most high schools until World War I or later. Not a lot of vocational application for dead languages.) And it's worth stressing how resilient that model is. The schedule of a high schooler in 1922 would look fairly similar to a high schooler in 2022 - English, Math, Science, History, PE, Music, Art, Foreign Language, and likely an elective or two.

That notion of an "elective" is where vocational education fits into public schools. There have been instances throughout American history where individual business owners worked with individual schools or school districts to incorporate specific vocational courses into a high school but that was in the late 1800s, early 1900s around the time of the founding of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education and the Smith-Hughes Act. One early example is the Crane Technical High School in Chicago which offered courses on the practical side of engineering. One of the challenges they often encountered, though, was the skills needs for working in a particular business were hard to translate to a high school setting - or to staff - and in many instances, it wasn't possible for a young person to meet emerging high school graduation criteria AND take specialized vocational education courses. So, the engineering courses at Crane weren't about preparing young people to be engineers, it was about giving them a leg up on the engineering courses they would take at college on their way to becoming engineers.

Smith-Hughes, passed in 1917, was designed to support the expansion of vocational education - including agricultural education and home economics - and to be sure, there were business advocates of the bill who likely saw it as a way to pass off the cost of training employees but it's hard to say that was its primary goal. Again, specific vocational training programs were hard to implement in the high school setting so the programs that emerged from the implementation of the bill were typically more general and were often taught at schools established explicitly for vocational education training, including those who welcomed adult learners. In addition, unlike schools in Germany, for example, American schools don't formally track (there's long been informal tracking experienced by children with disabilities, children of color, and those adults felt weren't well-suited to academic studies.) In 1948, New York State established a series of vocational schools across the state where students could receive high school course credit in exchange for taking vocational courses but the programs were fairly idiosyncratic and it wasn't until the 1970s or so that it became common for workplaces to accept a vocational high school diploma as a substitute for a trade college diploma. (That said, no national education system means the idiosyncratic nature of vocational education, especially since World War II cannot be overstressed. Odds are good someone will read this and say, "well, my grandfather got his trade diploma and then went to work at Factory X with no problem" and there would be no reason to doubt them. It's just hard to say that such a structure was widespread. A high school diploma didn't become necessary for employment until well after World War II.)

Most high school students experienced vocational training as an elective course in bookkeeping, homemaking, agricultural sciences, or early versions of what would later become shop class. In addition, they would also likely encounter the newly created position of "guidance counselor" who was positioned to help young people think about their life after high school. However, such support and electives weren't equally distributed. The children most likely to experience vocational education - meaning rather than academics, their days were spent being taught a specific trade - were Indigenous children sent to Indian Boarding Schools. One of the ways to try and disconnect the children from their families and communities was to teach them a skill that would make them "useful" in white society. More here on the schools.