In Somalia "employers express a preference to hire unskilled workers and train them for the specific job for which they are hired" Somalia Ministry of National Planning (1984, p. 8-39). "Employers report that the needs of the private sector are for people with a broader technical background than a vocational education provides" (Chapman and Windham, 1985). (And yet vocational and technical enrollments are projected to rise to 70% of total enrolment in the current five year plan, despite the fact that the Ministry of National Planning report states that the quality of the training received by vocational students is so low that they do not have a comparative advantage over other secondary school graduates in gaining employment: Somalia Ministry of National Planning, 1982, 1984).

Such is the importance attached by some large U.S. employers to basic skills, and such is their frustration with the output of the schools and their pessimism concerning the difficulty of getting the school system to respond to their needs, that they are prepared to take direct action and incur substantial expenditure on remedial general education, offering courses in basic arithmetic, basic grammar, writing skills, etc, adopting a curative rather than preventive strategy (Center for Public Resources, 1982). Thirty five percent of the corporations in a recent survey were found to provide remedial secondary education for their employees, AT&T alone spending $6 million a year for this purpose (Hemmings, 1982). A sample list of remedial courses offered by some employers is provided by Eurlich (1985).

To some extent the employers' perception of a need for courses of this type reflects a difference of opinion over what constitutes basic skills, and a general educator would not be expected to be enthusiastic about, say, the arithmetic course described in Council for Public Resources (1982) using tachistoscopes to increase computational speed and accuracy. But other divergences could be of more concern to educators, particularly those who feel a need to vocationalize education in some sense. Three independent surveys (Lusterman, 1977; Lynton, 1978, 1979; Center for Public Resources, 1982) found that employers attach greater importance than schools to the systematic development of interpersonal and communications skills. They are inclined to value more highly than schools skills which depend on primarily on practice, such as computational speed. And, even for students who are not entering technical occupations, employers see a greater need than schools for a knowledge of basic applied science or "technological literacy" (Lynton, 1979).

# 7.4 Technologv in the secondary curriculum

Given the fear of policymakers that the expansion of academic secondary education will exacerbate the problem of the educated unemployed, and the emphatic rejection by employers of attempts to impart job-readiness, it is natural to suppose that some compromise between these two extremes might have decisive advantages over both. On this premise rests the search for a dilute form of vocational education which would enhance employability and serve as a complement to, rather than attempt to substitute for, on-the-job training.

84 -

-