Text IV. Vocational Training in America and Europe
America has been in a panic about education for at least a decade and is right to be worried. Talk to businessmen and they will complain that they have a choice between providing new recruits with remedial education or moving their back-room offices abroad. America’s high-school drop-out rate is at least 14 % compared 9% in Germany and 6% in Japan. The school year is 180 days – 60 days fewer than in some other countries. Japanese children do five times as much homework per week as their American counterparts. Even when they are working, American children are seldom stretched. The lack of a core curriculum encourages a shopping-mall approach to education: pile up the soft options and leave the hard stuff on the shelves. The result is all too predictable. American children perform poorly in international academic tests.
German education commands admiration abroad and enthusiasm at home. German parents like it because it provides flexibility and choice. Students like it because it is intellectually demanding without being soul-destroying. Employers like it because it churns out skilled workers as well as scientists. The government did not have to think twice before imposing western German arrangements on the new lands in the east.
What makes the system so successful? The first thing is the cheerful division of schools into three kinds: grammer schools, technical schools and vocational schools. Grammer schools can challenge academic children without discouraging their less able contemporaries. Technical schools can motivate their pupils by introducing them to general principles through practical example. The most striking achievement of this system – more striking even than its success in grooming the elite – is its ability to engage the enthusiasm and test the abilities of the mass of tomorrow’s skilled workers.
Above all, the glory of German education is the so-called dual system. Any 15 year-old who does not want to go to university chooses a three-or-more-year apprenticeship instead. It combines on-the-job training in a local factory and theoretical education in school (this used to mean two days a week, but increasingly means three). Successful apprentices are guaranteed a job in a local factory. Their less successful contemporaries are more than likely to be able to put their training to good use.
The French have an enormous advantage over the British in implementing reforms: the legacy of Bonapartism. Scientific and technical schools have enjoyed a high status in France for two centuries. French schoolchildren have long been accustomed to spending much of their adolescence working for the school-leaving certificate, an examination that is at once broader than English A levels and more rigorous than German.
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This left the government free to concentrate on the weakest link in its educational chain: vocational training. The academia-obsessed school establishment despised it. Business was too short-sighted to invest in it. Apprenticeships hardly existed outside the artisan industries. So the government decided to act. It compelled firms to spend 1%of their sales on training, and encouraged vocational school to expand; it created a clear set of vocational qualifications; and it set out ambitious targets for improving the technical qualifications of the working population. Today almost all school-leavers who do not go to university enroll in full-time vocational courses that lead to nationally recognized qualifications.
The British have been even more radical than the French. They introduced a national curriculum backed up by regular examinations, finance schools on the basis of the number of children they attract (per capita funding), oblige local authorities to classify the schools in convenient league tables, bypass local-education authorities and hand budget to individual governing boards and set up a new type of school – the city technology colleges (CTCs). But a handful of CTCs and a host of TECs (Training and Enterprise Councils responsible for organizing training in their local areas) will not be enough to hold the Asian tigers at bay.
Vocabulary notes
remedial education [ri'mi:djəl] –коррективное обучение
back-room offices –секретные научно-исследовательские бюро или отделы
to be stretched – напрягаться
a core curriculum [kə'rikjuləm] –основной курс обучения
a shopping-mall approach –поверхностный подход к чему-либо
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to pile up the soft option –накоплять лёгкий выбор (материала)
contemporary –сверстник
to churn out –производить в больших количествах
to groom the elite –готовить элиту (к определённому роду деятельности)
to opt for… -сделать выбор или принять решение
apprenticeship [ə'prenti∫ip] –обучение ремеслу
advantage -преимущество
adolescence [edou'lesns] –юность
rigorous ['rigərəs] –строгий, суровый
artisan industries –кустарное ремесленное производство
to by pass –обходить
academia-obsessed –академически-одержимые
to estimate –оценивать способности
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