International Perspectives on Workforce Education and Development: New Views for a New Century (review)

Lifelong education is more than a slogan; rather, it is a fact. High geographical mobility, a reduction in barriers to enter long-protected labor markets, choices about when or whether to have children and who will raise them, and longer working lives all put skills and attitudes to use which have been developed long after formal schooling has ended. What then is the future for the development of these "workforce skills"? How are they acquired? Who (state, firm, or individual) should pay for them? How should they be evaluated as to their economic and social productivity for the individual or the broader community?

This edited volume is an attempt to address some of these issues. It contains two overview articles, first on the role of globalization and second on the conceptual model which guides each following article. Ten articles focus on particular case examples. These include country studies of the Peoples Republic of China, Sudan, Jamaica, Vietnam, the United States, Canada and Germany, England and Finland, and regional articles covering East Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East and North Africa. While their origins represent many different countries, the authors tend to come from the vocational and technical education profession. They seem more comfortable answering questions of "how" rather than "why and under what circumstances"—hence the essential weakness of this book.

The most interesting article is the one on globalization. It lays out what the authors feel are the inevitable forces for change without judgment. These include new production pressures on manufacturers, the demands from new business markets, new standards of information processing, management, and competition for both profit and nonprofit organizations. It raises the time-honored question about what knowledge is most worth having, whether workforce preparation should be primarily academic in nature, or whether it should provide technical skills. It discusses the issues raised by some who have challenged the economic viability of workforce preparation, and it ends with a series of rather common-sense homilies—that workforce education should focus less on short-term labor market entry skills and more on general knowledge about work adaptation; that in developing countries, skills narrowly focused on short-term labor market entry are most at risk for being economically wasteful; and that skill programs which divide learners into segregated groups are dysfunctional. The authors conclude that how each nation approaches this dilemma is the focus of the rest of the book.

The book could have been improved considerably if the other authors had followed that advice. Instead the articles are based, not on universal theoretical dilemmas, but on a "conceptual framework" from the second article. This framework lays out all conceivable influences on workforce education—government policy, national economic development, social and human capital, geographical location—none of which are particularly informative about how systems actually operate and instead encourage mindless description of the patently obvious. Sometimes case studies even inform the presumably ignorant reader of where the country is situated. The article describing the United States, for instance, begins one section by informing the reader that the United States was officially recognized at the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The best which could be said about this book is that it is uneven. The article on Britain describes skill levels now in force and how they are defined. The article on Finland describes how central funding can be effectively implemented locally. The article on the United States provides three compelling categories of skill-training (education through occupations, education based on career clusters, and education through "tech-prep" for more specialized training). These make sense. The book's drawbacks however fall into two generally categories, problems of commission and those of omission.

With respect to commission: One article holds that skills which leave a country are an economic loss, thus ignoring the economic evidence that a country may benefit by exporting skills...