Education and Development: The Issues and the Evidence

A curriculum option approach to technical and vocational education is also widespread
and continues to find favour in many countries. Pre-vocational studies, living stills, and
more traditional offerings like woodwork, metal work, and agricultural and domestic
science, secretarial and commercial skills, principles of accounts, etc. appear widely.
More recently technology and engineering studies have begun to appear. Some of these
subjects are incorporated into compulsory cores in some countries and others are treated
as options which are not compulsory.

Non-formal approaches are usually provided by non-government agencies with or
without assistance and by companies with an interest in providing training to their
workforce and the community they serve. This covers a very wide range of activities
from the truly non-formal with low levels of structure and high levels of experiential
learning, to arrangements which provide classroom teaching towards specific objectives
outside the normal institutional frameworks.

It was always likely to be difficult to strike the right balance between academic and
production related activities though some projects e.g. the Secondary School
Community Education project in Papua New Guinea, have approached the problems
with a considerable amount of imagination (Vulliamy 1983). Though production
orientated aspects of the curriculum can, under some circumstances, make contributions
to the costs of schooling though these are usually modest (Swartland and Taylor 1988,
Bray 1988, Achola and Kaluba 1989). For all these reasons the emphasis in many
countries has moved away from education with production models of schooling
towards greater focus on developing basic learning skills in the primary and junior
secondary grades.

Enhancing the links between schooling and work was widely advocated in the past in
parallel with non-formal initiatives in technical and vocational education to increase the
relevance of education to occupational futures. In many countries students were
encouraged to take part in production activities for educational reasons and in order to
make a contribution to costs. The experience highlighted several limitations. Amongst
the most important were those mentioned in the box overleaf.

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