that they prefer to provide all the vocational training needed by their employees.

Another frequent argument is that vocational education has no place in the public schools because it is a subsidy to employers. Those who hold this view almost invariably support professional education in public colleges, and really are saying that occupational preparation (and some degree of subsidy) is justifiable only for that minority of our population which goes to college.

Other theorists are willing to support vocational education in the public schools but believe it should be postponed until after high school graduation. There is some merit in this position. Most youths cannot secure meaningful employment until age 20, and when specific vocational education is received long before it can be used, many of the skills, knowledges, and attitudes will be forgotten.

There is no question that the trend is toward postponement of specific vocational education until junior college years. Unfortunately, however, most youths do not reach junior college. Indeed, many of them drop out before the junior year of high school when most vocational education courses now begin.

The problem of retention of early training is not peculiar to vocational education. The knowledges and skills of science are also apt to be forgotten if they are not used. This does not lead us to postpone all science instruction to the junior college years. Instead, we begin science instruction in the early elementary grades. As the student goes through school, he passes through a spiral science program which repeatedly exposes him to science concepts on a higher and higher level. A general feeling for science is imparted at first, and instruction becomes more and more specific as he goes through school. If the student enjoys science, it can lead to a greater appreciation for other subjects such as English and mathematics.

Considerations such as these lead to the curriculum proposals presented later in this report. This curriculum lends intelligibility to other academic subjects; it encourages the student to stay in school until he is prepared for meaningful employment; and it postpones the more specific (and easily forgotten) types of instruction until they are needed.

THE RESULTS OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

Our deliberations have identified several areas which need additional attention. But in spite of these difficulties and problems, publicly supported vocational education is the only formal means of employment preparation available to most noncollege students. Apprenticeship is an important route which depends on the help of vocational education for related instruction, but it involves relatively few youths in a limited number of trades. As already stated, the Manpower Development and Training program, the Job Corps, and other similar training programs are primarily remedial in nature, rendering their important services to those who failed to take advantage of opportunities for occupational preparation in the schools. MDTA is, in the main, dependent upon State and local vocational education for personnel and facilities, and other remedial programs have varying degrees of similar reliance.

Limited followup data continue to show a high proportion of placement for vocational students, even though many of them choose further training and many shift to other occupations. Sample studies give high marks to vocational education for its impact on the subsequent employment experiences of its graduates, particularly in contrast to those in the general curriculum (whether this finding indicates the strengths of the former or the weaknesses of the latter is debatable). Studies relating the costs of vocational education to the benefits derived have given it solid support. When controlled for differences in native ability, vocational students profit substantially as compared to others in both employment and earnings. The agenda for the future suggests further improvement and expansion of vocational education. It is in pursuit of that objective that we discuss, in the following section, some of the basic concepts essential to adequate occupational preparation and career development.

IV. BASIC CONCEPTS OF EDUCATION FOR EMPLOYMENT

As earlier sections have shown, the Vocational Education Act of 1963 in many ways charted a major reorientation of vocational education. However, in the brief time available, the promise of the act has not been realized. Meantime the world of work and the problems of preparation for it, access to it, and sucessful performance in it have become even more complex. Out of the changing social and economic environment of the past two decades has emerged clearer concepts of career development, some new and some modifications of earlier ones. From these concepts we can draw operational principles and design a system of legislative and administrative changes necessary for achieving vocational education for all. Three concepts are particularly relevant to this report.

ACADEMIC AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

It is no longer possible to compartmentalize education into general, academic, and vocational components. Education is a crucial element in preparation for a successful working career at any level. With rising average educational attainment, better educated people are available so that the employer seldom needs to accept the less educated. If it represents nothing else, a high school diploma is evidence of consistency, persistence, some degree of self discipline, and perhaps even of docility. The relevance of education for employment arises from better educated labor and a technology that requires it. The educational skills of spoken and written communication, computation, analytical techniques, knowledge of society and one's role in it, and skill in human relations are as vital as the skills of particular occupations.

On the other hand, employability skills are equally essential to education. If education is preparation for life, and if practically everyone's life and opportunities for self-expression and self-fulfillment include work, then only the successfully employable are successfully educated. American society is achievement oriented and attributes something less than wholeness to the nonstriver and nonachiever. Culture and vocation are inseparable and unseverable aspects of humanity.

Vocational education is not a separate discipline within education, but it is a basic objective of all education and must be a basic element of each person's education. It is also a teaching technique which may have even more to offer as method than as substance. As a selecting out process for the professions, education has fostered, stressed, and rewarded the verbal skills important to these pursuits. It has given too little attention to development of attitudes, manipulative skills, and adaptability to new situations. In the process of emphasizing verbal skills, the predominant methods of instruction are lecture and discussion, and little attention is given to the alternative technique of learning by doing. As discussed earlier, for many students, the techniques of vocational education can supply a core around which an attractive package of academic as well as skill content can be prepared which will be more palatable and useful to undermotivated students than either alone. This may be most applicable to those from deprived environments whose verbal experiences have been limited and whose time horizons have been shortened by expectation of failure. Skill development can be accomplished through work experience or through education in the school's shops and laboratories. The key is to build a better means of integrating academic education, skill training, and work experience. The common objective should be a successful life in which employment has a crucial role.

THE CONSTANCY OF CHANGE

The second premise is by now a cliche: "Nothing will henceforth be more constant than change." Technological and economic progress feeds on itself, opening new vistas and closing the old. The underprepared are threatened by displacement, and the well prepared are confronted with new opportunities. Both require adaptability. Preventive measures can reduce the demand for remedial programs but never eliminate the need for them. Appropriately prepared persons may be highly adaptable, but that adaptability may depend upon upgrading present skills as well as acquiring new ones. The need for continuous learning, formal or informal, will certainly become universal. There will always be those with inadequate preventive occupational preparation who will need remedial help.

The demand upon vocational education is clear: Programs for youth must prepare them for change: programs for adults must be universally available, and must emphasize coping with change.

TOWARD FREEDOM OF OPPORTUNITY

Finally, the most treasured value of our society is the worth and freedom of the individual. Each individual is entitled to the benefits of a social system which will make it possible for him to get from where he is to where he has the potential to be. One operational measure of freedom is the range of choice available to the individual. The major constraints upon the range of choice are ignorance and poverty and disease and discrimination. Education can reduce the barriers of ignorance and proper occupational preparation can lower the barriers of poverty. They cannot eliminate disease and discrimination but they can substantially contribute to overcoming them.

OPERATIONAL PRINCIPLES

A number of operational principles follow from these premises: 1. Vocational education cannot be meaningfully limited to the skills necessary for a particular occupation. It is more appropriately defined as all of those aspects of educational experience which help a person to discover his talents, to relate them to the world of work, to choose an occupation, and to refine his talents and use them successfully in employment. In fact, orientation and assistance in vocational choice may often be more valid determinants of employment success, and therefore more profitable uses of educational funds, than specific skill training. 2. In a technology where only relative economic costs, not engineering know-how, prevent mechanization of routine tasks, the age of "human use of human beings" may be within reach, but those human beings must be equipped to do tasks which machines cannot do. Where complex instructions and sophisticated decisions mark the boundary between the realm of man and the role of the machine, there is no longer room for any dichotomy between intellectual competence and manipulative skills and, therefore, between academic and vocational education.

3. In a labor force where most have a high school education, all who do not are at a serious competitive disadvantage. But at the same time, a high school education alone cannot provide an automatic ticket to satisfactory and continuous employment. Education cannot shed its responsibilities to the student (and to society in his behalf) just because he has chosen to reject the system or because it has handed him a diploma. In a world where the distance between the experiences of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood and between school and work continually widen, the school must reach forward to assist the student across the gaps just as labor market institutions must reach back to assist in the transition. It is not enough to dump the school leaver into a labor market pool. The school along with the rest of society must provide him a ladder, and perhaps help him to climb it.

4. Some type of formal occupational preparation must be a part of every educational experience. Though it may be well to delay final occupational choice until all the alternatives are known, no one ought to leave the educational system without a salable skill. In addition, given the rapidity of change and the competition from generally rising educational attainment, upgrading and remedial education opportunities are a continual necessity. Those who need occupational preparation most, both preventive and remedial, will be those least prepared to take advantage of it and most difficult to educate and train. Yet for them, particularly, equal rights do not mean equal opportunity. Far more important is the demonstration of equal results.

5. The objective of vocational education should be the development of the individual, not the needs of the labor market. One of the functions of an economic system is to structure incentives in such a way that individuals will freely choose to accomplish the tasks which need to be done. Preparation for employment should be flexible and capable of adapting the system to the individual's need rather than the reverse. The system for occupational preparation should supply a salable skill at any terminal point chosen by the individual, yet no doors should be closed to future progress and development.

In short, an environment is emerging in which nearly all require salable skills which demand intellectual as well as manipulative content and which include the base for constant adaptation to change. An increasing amount of the knowledge necessary to success must be organized and presented in a formal manner; the pickup or observation methods of the past are no longer adequate. Rural schools with their inadequate offerings and ghetto schools with their deficient resources, added to the initial environmental handicaps of their students, can never hope, without special assistance, to gain on the quality-conscious suburban schools. Education is neither the unique cause, nor the sole cure of the problems of the rural depressed area or the urban slum. But it is a necessary factor.

V. TOWARD A UNIFIED SYSTEM OF VOCATIONAL

EDUCATION

That most of the concepts of section IV were in the minds of the authors of the Vocational Education Act of 1963 is apparent from its declaration of purpose "that persons of all ages in all communities of the State-those in high school, those who have completed or discontinued their formal education and are preparing to enter the labor market, those who have already entered the labor market but need to upgrade their skills or learn new ones, and those with special educational handicaps-will have ready access to vocational training or retraining which is of high quality, which is realistic in the light of actual or anticipated opportunities for gainful employment, and which is suited to their needs, interests, and ability to benefit from such training."

An adequate system of vocational education capable of achieving these objectives while coping with a changing environment, should. we believe, have the following characteristics:

1. Occupational preparation should begin in the elementary schools with a realistic picture of the world of work. Its fundamental purposes should be to familiarize the student with his world and to provide him with the intellectual tools and rational habits of thought to play a satisfying role in it.

2. In junior high school economic orientation and occupational preparation should reach a more sophisticated stage with study by all students of the economic and industrial system by which goods and services are produced and distributed. The objective should be exposure to the full range of occupational choices which will be available at a later point and full knowledge of the relative advantages and the requirements of each.

3. Occupational preparation should become more specific in the high school, though preparation should not be limited to a specific occupation. Given the uncertainties of a changing economy and the limited experiences upon which vocational choices must be made, instruction should not be overly narrow but should be built around significant families of occupations or industries which promise expanding opportunities.

All students outside the college preparatory curriculum should acquire an entry-level job skill, but they should also be prepared for posthigh-school vocational and technical education. Even those in the col