"An example [of a preference for more general training than is currently provided] is provided by those groups that met to discuss various occupations based on or related to pre-employment preparation involving electricity and electronics. They included the Task Forces on Advanced Business Machines, Interconnect Telephone, and Major Appliance Repair, and were supplemented with observations by employers whose jobs ranged in technical complexity from alarm services to the maintenance of bio-medical equipment. Without exception, these employers agreed that subdividing such training into occupational specialties at the high school or manpower level is wasteful of both physical and human resources. They would prefer, they said, an electricity or electronics core curriculum from which either ability or preference could lead individual students to their maximum potential in both personal and labor-market terms. Low-level departures from such a core, they thought, could lead to such occupations as appliance or typewriter repair, or into apprenticeships for electrician or computer maintainer. An alternate track for the higher-level occupations could be post-secondary educational institutions, particularly those employing cooperative education formats. A particularly strong aptitude and preference could be developed, on the basis of such a core, into engineering training in one of the electrical or electronic concentrations, or could combine such training with a desire for hands-on involvement in such a field as the maintenance and/or modification of advanced bio-medical or laboratory research equipment. Such options, the employers said, are foreclosed'by the inflexibility of both curriculum and instructional staff in the present specific-occupations format." (Lynton, 1979).

Japanese employers place even greater emphasis on general education. A recent survey reports "major employers have no interest in vocational education attainments. They do not want 15 year olds, and are indifferent to vocational education courses at the postcompulsory stage.. .As a result the school system does not expect to concentrate on vocational education. There is none at the compulsnry level and even in vocational courses provided in senior high schools the specialized subjects occupy only 30% of the syllabus and are not normally designed to impart immediately usable skills.. .The purpose of education is clear-cut. It provides what the dominant voices in industry and commerce want, in the national interest, and generally does so to their satisfaction. It is regarded as socially, politically and economically efficient. It is not regarded as an appropriate provider of anything looking like training. Vocational education is now provided half-heartedly, for those unable to compete academically.. .The emphasis in education is towards even greater generalization, rathez than specialization". (Hayes, Anderson and Fonda, 1984).

Similar conclusions are reached in a recent World Bank study (Inoue, 1985) and by Reubens and Harrison (1980), who attributes the development of enterprise-based training in prewar and wartime Japan to a failure of public vocational schools to keep up with technological change and a consequent disenchantment of employers.

In Britain, France and Germany, Noah and Eckstein (1986) report that employers see the need for vocational education, but only in the sense of

- 82 -