Parental Error Blamed For Dilemma Overseas

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31588, 27 January 1968, Page 14

Parental Error Blamed For Dilemma Overseas

The problem created by parents in developing countries demanding academic education for their children instead of much-needed technical training, was underlined in an interview yesterday, by a former New Zealand. Director of ducation (Dr C. E. Beeby), who is now on the staff of the University of London. Many developing countries, he said, now had growing bodies of educated unemployed, with all the factors that entailed of economic waste, personal frustration and political unrest. India, with at least a million educated unemployed, was a striking example of this. One cause of such a dilemma, said Dr Beeby, had been the choice of the wrong kind of education. The expectations which parents, and children, had of the kind of job each level of education would buy were so faulty that they refused to accept the humbler forms of work from which they were expecting the schools to rescue them. These tendencies were reinforced by the high prestigewidespread in so many developing countries—given to academic education, and by the low standing of trade and technical education and of the occupations that went with such learning. Dr Beeby said that in most developing countries the range of salaries was far greater than in Australia and New Zealand. The salaries usully paid to top "white collar” workers were about the same as those previously paid

European civil servants, but tradesmen and tecbnicians had scales of pay which had evolved from the meagre local rates of old. "The result is that the scale for even high-level technicians frequently stops at the point where the scale for inexperienced young graduates begins,” Dr Beeby said. “I have seen countries where trade and technical schools have been closed or stand half empty, although the countries concerned desperately needed the skills they taught. At the same time, parents clamoured for places in secondary schools for their children, though the

country was flooded with graduates.” Dr Beeby said India and many African countries were seriously embarrassed by the mushroom growth of private, profit - making secondary schools of low quality.

The situation could be met only by improving living conditions and by educating parents to the point where they began to understand something of the nature and the limitations of the education they demanded for their children.

Adult education was a necessary concomitant to the growth of an effective school system.