Can Education Really Help?

• Education can indeed help, provided its potential and limitations in the present
context are clearly recognized
• Among other things, it ought to be acknowledged that education is no
substitute for job creation and work sharing
• Therefore, the temptation to overemphasize the importance of educational
policy in the fight against youth unemployment must be resisted
• Another point is that schools are unlikely to provide employers with a “finished
product”, since a given firm is, as a rule, better placed for providing young
people with the very specific skills required by its own activities
• This point is not to be taken as an indictment of the school system for failing to
train young people correctly, but as a recognition of the fact that certain skills
are best learnt on the job, or to put it in another way, that firms have no
contribution to make an imparting them
 Can Education Really Help?
• Clearly, then an educational strategy designed to fight unemployment
amongst young people must concentrate on providing skills to make them
more employable
• However, this strategy must take into account their attitudes and
distinguishing characteristics in order to be effective
– First, it should be recalled that, besides lacking what employers regards as well-defined
skills, young people fresh from school know nothing about the world of work in general
– Second, many of then do not seem to know what they want, which is hardly surprising
when they have had no opportunity to experiment with anything at all: even when they
are able to express preferences, they often know nothing about what these imply in
practice, so that the difference between fantasy and reality is often appreciable
– Third, many young people seen in no hurry to select a well-defined stable occupation,
often acquiring jobs which they are sometimes quite prepared to change even at the
risk of falling back into unemployment
• The upshot of all this is that youth unemployment is not a once-and-for-all
phenomenon, reflecting rather the problems involved in the transition from
school to work during which small jobs alternate with unemployment, part-time
employment with inactivity, and “moonlighting” with official work
• Obviously, during this period, young people are seldom regarded by
employers in the same way as senior adult workers whose commitment to
their firms is rewarded with substantially higher wages and other benefits
 Can Education Really Help?
• What then can education do to help young people find their way from school to
stable employment?
– Obviously, since neither schools nor firms alone seem capable of providing what is
ideally required, it is perhaps not unreasonable to suggest to join forces
– This leads in turn to the idea of a two- to three-years transitional phase enabling school
leavers to benefit from alternate periods of training and on-the-job professional
experience in suitable institutions
– In such a system, young people, while no longer full-time students, would not yet be full-
time workers either
– Learning at work and in school would be combined in appropriate sequences so as to be
mutually reinforcing
• This form of training would facilitate the transition of young people from school
to working life by helping them find their bearings in a world with which they
are largely unfamiliar, equipping them with marketable skills, and steering them
into full-time stable employment
 Can Education Really Help?
• Indeed, in these three key fields of guidance, acquisition of skills, and professional
integration, it would seem likely to give far better results than traditional vocational
training or full-time schooling
– Guidance implies familiarizing young people with the working world and helping them
discover their aptitudes and interests so that they can make an informed choice of
career
– The acquisition of skills have always been the prime aim of traditional vocational
training, but alternated work and training go a step further, aiming to develop the ability
to reflect about working live situation
– They would also facilitate the professional integration of young people by stimulating
their awareness about the realities and constraints of the labor market
• Finally, such a system of training would keep them abreast of changing labor market
conditions much more effectively than traditional vocational training or full-time
schooling
• Therefore, linked work and training is not only an educational principle, but also an
institutional principle enabling a variety of training schemes, different both in level and
length, to be developed into a logically organized training system for all school leavers
• This is not an easy task as, in practice, this system must come to grips with a wide
variety of educational, institutional, and organizational problems:
– How best to organize trainees’ time
– How to coordinate in-plant and in-school training periods
– How to make industrial tutors and teachers work in cooperation
– How to share the costs of training between firms, trainees and government, and
– How to administer effectively linked work and training
 Can Education Really Help?
• Youth unemployment problems cannot be solved without firm commitment to
its objectives on the part of all interested parties, including training institutions,
employers, unions, and local and central government
• Out-of-school training schemes should first impart basic, general skills in the
form of remedial education before trying to deliver specific skills, and that
schools are still better equipped than other institutions to do this
• Gradual lowering of academic standards in compulsory or high school
education and this is, indeed, one of the most vexing issues facing today’s
educational policy makers
– The present crisis of confidence in schools goes deeper and that the climate of
“pervasive permissiveness” surrounding them signals a loss of credibility
• True alternated work and training implies giving full weight to the training
value of work experience
• This is not to belittle the benefits afforded by schools and training centers in
the form of systematic instruction nor to assume that all work situations have
training potential, but rather to restore the balance between in-school and on-
the-job training