The Role Of The Educator In The Preparation Of TomorrowS Workforce In The Middle East.
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The Role of the Educator in the Preparation of Tomorrows Workforce in the Middle East.
William Arthur Ward once wrote;
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
It is not my intention to tell anybody here how they should teach, rather I would like to discuss the relationship between education, employment and the development of tomorrows workforce.
To understand why countries developed various ways of organising their education system we need to step back and look at history.
In ancient history, education (as we know it) had little relevance to the everyday life of the common person and was largely the preserve of advisers to rulers.
In the middle Ages, the education process developed as the thoughts and ideas of learned people and thinkers were no longer disseminated orally but were distribution through the written word. This was a laborious and expensive process. Consequently, only the nobility and the rich merchant classes could afford to receive an education. The general population still had little need for classical learning as they were still primarily engaged with the daily survival of life. Their overlord or master controlled their life and commerce was based on a barter system.
As the process of modern state formation began to develop i.e. the establishment of specialised institutions for the establishment of monopolies like police, army etc. over a given territory and the administration of a system of law and taxation leading to the development of an economy, a need to develop administrators grew; as unless governments could guarantee contracts by the power of the state there would be little point in making business arrangements. Likewise, if business arrangements are made that turn out to be prosperous, and the state takes away the profits of the business then there is no incentive for people to be involved in business.
Pre-industrial revolution Germany, or Prussia as it was at the time, developed an education system to ensure a supply of literate and disciplined recruits for the kings army. Andy Green wrote in 1990;
“The promotion of education clearly fitted in with the objectives of the absolutist state, particularly in its later years when the importance of expert administration and technical knowledge in the arts of war and industry became important. Secondary schooling was increasingly important to provide the bureaucracy with trained and efficient staff, whilst technical and vocational schools could supply the military with capable recruits, and the state manufacturers and public works with expert engineers. Elementary schooling was likewise increasingly necessary to provide disciplined and loyal military and naval cadets and to promote patriotism among the people. The attempt to create universal, state controlled and bureaucratically administered national education systems can thus be seen as a typical product of state formation in the period of absolutism.”
While in the U.S.A., following the war of independence, with no common enemy, the development of an education system was used primarily as a means to unify the huge numbers of emigrants to a common identity.
In Britain, as industrialisation began in the 18th century, firms were organised on the basis of family relationships and sub-contracting. The demand for what we now refer to as highly skilled labour was small, confined to an elite group of owner/managers, professional workers and government officials. Workers requiring craft skills obtained these through an apprenticeship system or practical experience. In textiles and construction, unskilled labour could be used which did not need to be literate. This enabled Britain to industrialise with one of the lowest levels of literacy in Europe. This legacy has allowed Britains education system to develop with a high degree of autonomy in relation to the needs of industry.
In the U.S.A. new forms of mass-production was epitomised by the Ford Assembly line. Processes were broken down into simplified units that enabled employers to utilise the unskilled and semi-skilled labour of immigrants. The demand for craft skills was reduced and employers could control the process of skill formation within their enterprises. The education system only needed to provide the basic literacy skills to support the increasing bureaucratic forms of control. However, as industry grew, to co-ordinate thousands of semi-skilled workers new forms of managerial control and skills were required. The result was the emergence of the modern corporation. This in turn led to an increase in the demand for professional managers to control the labour force and co-ordinate the process of production. The later emergence of new industries such as chemicals also placed reliance on the large corporation for the co-ordination of production. This reinforced the demand for new skills in managerial control: both sophisticated financial procedures and mechanisms for controlling work behaviour, as industries such as automobiles and food production deskilled the labour process. In other industries, such as electrical engineering, the emphasis was more on development of professional and technical skills. The result in the U.S.A. was a significant demand for educated people to train as managers, technicians, and professional workers together with a burgeoning demand for literate, unskilled, and semi-skilled labour. Thus, at the lower levels of the education system employers were making few demands, but at the higher levels, there was a strong drive to ensure that the education system provided the managerial and technical skills necessary for the new ways of organising production. This lead to the development of business education and business schools in the U.S.A. while leaving a modern legacy of a relatively low level of intermediate skills.
This coincided with the next phase of industrialisation i.e. white goods and diversified quality production in Germany.
In these new industries technology required that employees acquired a higher level of skill. This took the form of scientific and technical input into the design and management of the production systems as well as a higher level of technical knowledge and problem solving skills.
These developments in the system of production created a demand for intermediate and higher-level skills among the majority of the labour force employed in manufacturing. These societies characterised by a high proportion of such industries in their economies, developed education and training systems that produced these skills among the majority of