‘Schools cannot solve unemployment’

Press, 5 July 1988, Page 8

‘Schools cannot solve unemployment’

By

JENNY LONG

Further training for young people will not solve the unemployment problem, says Professor Ivan Snook, of the education department at Massey University.

Schools do not cause unemployment, and cannot help to solve it, he told the secondary school principals’ conference at Lincoln yesterday. Unemployment, including youth unemployment, was now here to stay, said Professor Snook. Unemployment was not the result of a mismatch between skills and ■’acancies, he said. In Australia, where excellent statistics were available, there were 63,000 vacancies and 630,000 unemployed in February last year. “Ten job-hunters for

every vacancy, and no amount of skill-training or the like would have made any difference to the number unemployed.” A social policy which “harangued” young people on the need to get their qualifications could therefore not be justified, Professor Snook said. This did not mean that young people should not be encouraged to stay at school, but they should be given individual counselling as to their options, including part-time or further education. At present, many young people felt pushed along

by forces over which they had no control, Professor Snook said. The young

people felt they were at fault, and became alientated from school, friends and perhaps the wider society. “Now that youth unemployment seems here to stay, ways must be found to minimise the deleterious effects on the young,” he said. School in its wider sense was “preparation for life,” not merely preparation for a job, Professor Snook said. Pupils staying longer at school would be able to

take part in a planned three-year senior school curriculum.

Schools should resist the danger of providing separate curricula for the academic and nonacademic pupil, and pupils should not be streamed by ability, Professor Snook said. Schools must remember that pupils learned at different speeds. Professor Snook suggested that schools should move to “mastery learning,” where all pupils could work at their own pace and not move on until they understood the work.