in terms of a sharp break between two vastly different worlds, the objective of the former being to prepare young people for the latter. This image-and the ways of thinking associated with it-is in the process of becoming largely obsolete. At the university level, the increasing proportion of students holding part-time and fulltime jobs reflects a significant blurring of the division between school and work. In some countries, more so in North America than in Europe, large numbers of highschool students get a full-time job while attending the last year of secondary education. Arrangements for providing part-time schooling at post-compulsory education level have been set up in the Netherlands and in the Federal Republic of Germany, in an attempt to smooth out the between school and work. The Belgian case provides another interesting example. When it was decided in 1983 to extend compulsory schooling from 14 to 18 years of age, a two-step approach with full-time schooling up to 16-which confirmed the de facto enrolment situation-and part-time schooling between 16 and 18 years of age, was adopted. Its aim was again to make gradual entry into the labour force possible for young people. In the technical/vocational streams of the educational system, combining schoolbased instruction and work experience was always the basic principle of traditional apprenticeship. This principle is now being extended to other forms of technical/ vocational education in the form of working periods in firms, which are integrated into the school curricula. Most 'transition education' schemes set up recently for school-leavers at the end of compulsory schooling are designed according to this principle of alternation between work and training periods, the main objective of which is to ease the from school to work. It is thus abundantly clear that the latter has been subject to profound changes in recent years. The traditional separation between the world of school and the world of work is gradually giving way to closer integration following a number of institutional changes whose far-reaching consequences have not yet been fully spelt out. The purpose of this article is to examine and discuss more closely of the consequences of the emergence of transition education, meaning by this the wide array of schemes recently set up by European governments to ease the from school to work at the end of compulsory schooling.