Passage of the School to Work Act in the U.S. can be seen as part of a broad trend occurring throughout the industrialized world: The boundaries between work and organized learning are slowly dissolving. Like the U.S., a number of other countries, including Australia, Korea, France, Sweden, and the U.K., are trying to send more students into workplaces. The American movement to integrate vocational and academic instruction within the schools also has its current counterpart in several other countries. At the same time, hybrid institutions are flourishing, as employers conduct education and training, and schools operate enterprises that produce goods and services.
What seems to be driving this trend is a growing functional integration of learning and work. It is increasingly recognized that learning and production can, do, and must take place at the same time. While this has always been true to some extent in all work, and to a great extent in some occupations such as medicine and engineering, the functional integration of learning and work appears to be spreading in many fields. It is a direct consequence of more rapid change in markets and technologies: individuals and organizations must learn all the time. When nothing stands still, "you're an apprentice all your life." For example, who can ever catch up with proliferating advances in information processing and telecommunications?
Functional integration means that learning moves closer to work. There is more "just-in-time learning" as organizations try to build continual learning into the work process itself. Like just-in-time inventory control, this avoids unnecessary investment and reduces deterioration caused by non-use. Learning in the context of real problem-solving is also more meaningful and motivating.
At the same time, work itself changes. Continual adaptation requires faster transmission of existing know-how, and also more rapid creation of new ideas to improve products or work processes. People up and down the pay scale must be motivated more by intrinsic interest and curiosity in order to keep asking questions about how things could be done better. At New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc., an automobile company in Fremont, California, where the UAW has collaborated with the company to restructure the work, the local union leader has urged his members, "If you don't have a problem, that's a problem!" Contemporary competition depends on a continual flow of ideas from everyone.
To prepare individuals for this kind of work, many employers now have been calling for education that promotes creative thinking for all students, not just for the elite as in the past. Apparently, there is some convergence between the economic and humanistic missions of education. The economic imperative for all students to learn to "use their minds well" also serves the purpose of education for citizenship, parenthood, and membership in a civilized culture.
Vocational education and schooling for work therefore take on new significance. No longer alternatives to academic education, they now can serve as means to promote it. The basic dichotomy between academic and vocational education is dissolving along with the boundaries between learning and work. Even within the colleges and universities, some changes are beginning to occur. Of course, the dichotomy between vocational and academic will not disappear quickly or without struggle, since the traditional disciplines have existed for a long time, and it is not entirely clear what will take their place. Still, there is pressure to create something new. It is not simply education for work, but it includes education through work, where work itself is perpetual education. NCRVE can and should continue to play a key role in defining this new relationship between education and employment, and in helping to bring it about.
David Stern, Director, NCRVE