guidance and perhaps as an antidote to the disparagement of business in the schools. In Britain for example, a memorandum of the Confederation of British Industry to the House of Commons Committee on Education, Science and Arts stated that "employers.. .strongly support the case for vocational elements within the school curriculum, particularly in the later years of compulsory education. By this we do not mean specific vocational courses as an entry into particular trades or occupations, but a general vocational approach leading to an orientation across the whole of school life which encourages the development of attitudes, skills and knowledge of relevance to adult society...we believe that young people should leave school with an adequate understanding of how wealth is created in our society and an appropriate evaluation of the essential role of industry and commerce" (cited by Noah and Eckstein, 1986).

These sentiments are echoed by the Association of British Chambers of Commerce declaration that "Industry prefers to manage the provision of training itself and sees the job of schools as providing a foundation on which training can be based, supplying trainable, but not trained, recruits" (Association of British Chambers of Commerce, 1984, cited by Noah and Eckstein, 1986). With regard to the curriculum, British employers are primarily concerned with basics as conventionally defined (Jamieson and Lightfoot, 1982; Noah and Eckstein, 1986).

In developing countries employers' opinions, like other aspects of labor markets, are less well documented, and such surveys as have been undertaken have often not asked directly for priorities, with the result that they tend to find that employers want more of everything. But the scattered evidence that does exist suggests that employers opinions concerning priorities are similar to those in developed countries.

In South Korea "the high school graduates' weak areas most commonly pointed out by employers are a lack of proficiency in foreign languages and inadequate writing capability in the national language. **.** This deficiency in high school education causes many employers to hire college graduates." (Lee, 1983).

A survey in Honduras found that employers' opinions could be summarized as "give me someone who can read and write, who is motivated, who understands the meaning of work, and I can train him or her myself" (Kelly et. al., 1985). In Panama, where the literacy rate is 90%, a survey of employers found nevertheless that the problem most frequently cited by them with regard to their workers was the poor basic education of the latter, which inhibited their ability to absorb new technical concepts and skills (Cuervo, 1985, pp. 3-30, 31). And their concern with comportment and motivation is such that they strongly prefer the graduates of a private technical institute to those of the public ones, despite the fact that the private institute uses 30 to 40 year old outdated equipment and recruits students of lower socioeconomic status, the explanation being that the institute directly and successfully addresses the employers' biggest problem--poor work ethic and attitude (Cuervo, 1985, 3-26, 27).

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