On a Unesco conference: What is the relationship between secondary education, training and employment?

Abstract

Lou i s Emmer i j (Netherlands). From I963 to x97o he was with the Directorate for Sdentifie Affairs, OECD; since z97z, head of the Employment Planning and Promotion Department of the International Labour Organisation (ILO ) , World Employment Programme. He is the author and co-author of several works, and most recently, C a n the School Bui ld a N e w Social Order? The preoccupation with the link between secondary education and employment has arisen above all in many developing countries where, at this level of education, the phenomenon of educated unemployment is becoming increasingly serious. In the last few years we have been observing analogous symptoms in industrialized countries, but at the higher level of education, and I will therefore leave the industrialized countries out of the picture for the time being. I hope it is not necessary to repeat that education has a host of objectives to meet and to satisfy of which the employment objective is only one. A first question that has to be asked and answered is concerned with the independent effect of education on the employment problem in developing countries. For us in the World Employment Programme of the ILO, the employment problem goes much beyond the question of open unemployment and includes more importantly the vast numbers of people who, although employed by any conventional standards, only receive poverty returns from their labour. The 'working poor' in the urban informal sector and traditional rural sector constitute the bulk of the employment problem. Understood in this way, the employment problem must be put in the centre of economic and social development planning and policies and cannot be looked at in isolation, as a separate sector. It would already be intuitively obvious that by changing education and training policies alone and nothing else, the impact on the employment problem of such partial changes would be less than significant. It follows, therefore, that it must be made very clear at the outset that, if the end objective is to do something