Organization for economic cooperation and development; Partnership for progress, part 4

Partnership for progress a special series of reports from the recent Washington policy conference on education in the advancement of economic development. This series is brought to you by the National Association of educational broadcasters. The conference was sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development the organizational outgrowth of the one time Marshall Plans organization for European Economic Cooperation. Now writer and producer for this series of reports is the and E.B. radio network's Washington analyst John F.. Lewis the discussion of the conference regarding the role of the ECD member countries including the United States and Canada may play in regard to helping underdeveloped countries improve both their educational systems and their economies show that we face some mammoth obstacles. Just a few of those obstacles were outlined for conference delegates by Professor SH Harbison of Princeton University who has a distinguished career in working with educators in underdeveloped areas of the world.

One of the most formidable I think is traditional thinking. For example those who have experience with traditional methods and elementary education are suspicious of new technologies which might reduce teaching. Most of the leaders of the newly developing countries are unaware also of the great strides recently made in the methodology of in-service training in the advanced countries and do not see the possibilities of concentrating on the development of employed manpower. The very thought of overhauling the wage and salary structures in government ministries is frightening. And the idea of tampering with higher education to turn out more people say at the sub professional level rather than fully trained for a five year college graduates is really not consistent with the indoctrination that one may have had at Oxford Cambridge Harvard or the sore ball.

Yet these countries must do things in a revolutionary way and if they're committed to accelerated growth innovation fresh new thinking is vitally necessary. In short the first obstacle is to overcome traditional thinking. Secondly the governmental structure of the newly developing countries is another obstacle. Thinking and planning tends to be carried on in separate compartments. The ministries of education customarily deal only with formal education. Some don't even have jurisdiction over technical education which is the province of the ministries of industry or commerce ministries of labor are concerned with employment standards and so though not all aspects of training of skilled and semi-skilled labor.

The ministries of industry commerce and agriculture are likely to be preoccupied with technical and financial questions rather than with human resource development questions and the economic development ministries or development boards if they exist at all are generally concerned with physical capital formation balance of payments problems and other urgent economic questions. And they're likely to assume that trained and educated manpower somehow or other will appear magically as soon as factories dams roads and ditches are completed. Each government ministry or agency in other words grasps and rather blindly for some program or some aspect of manpower development and in justification makes very wild claims some time for its indispensable role in promoting rapid growth. Third foreign technical experts I think

have added to the confusion. And that's got a ration of effort in the field of human resource development strategies. Each has a particular package to sell and each technical assistant or group of technical assistance normally deals with only one minister and each with tireless zeal tries to educate the top leadership on the proportions of his particular yet narrow project. There is I think you will agree and most of these countries came and some times cut throat competition among the givers of pay. In the developing countries offers of help may be forthcoming from the United Nations from UNESCO's the ILO the ICAO the West German government the Soviet Union and other governments as well as several private philanthropical foundations and a host of church missions and other

voluntary organisations not to mention the Peace Corps. Dr Harbison was followed by a strong critic of the Western world's relationships past and present with underdeveloped areas such as Africa and Asia. The speaker is John Vaizey of the University of London's Institute of Education who offered a number of particularly helpful suggestions along with his criticism about education I think it has been a it is in many countries in the underdeveloped and we would do well to remind ourselves that in many countries one of the most serious social problems is the existence of intellectual unemployment and that it is ending in comparatively recent times that the Western nations themselves have ceased to suffer from this problem. I think it's very important that we should use frankly and open one of the major reasons why the Soviet Union and to some extent peoples China have been able to

develop quickly and why the need of Nigeria and other developing countries to develop even more quickly poses with a major political problem which we have to face before we give them aid. After all the reason why the Soviet Union developed very rapidly was that every single person who could read and write had a job and there was no argument for a great deal of the time about what sort of job they wanted. They were the jobs that the society needed doing and they were sent to do them and they did it. Now I think that the problems of poverty the problems of illiteracy the problems of disease in Africa and Asia are so gigantic that ANY him whether it is dictated or not to solve these problems quickly is a first and a very human priority. I

think that a great deal of education in the poorer countries is inappropriate to the needs fantastically expensive. But what it does is to educate unemployed who become revolutionaries rather than educating the engineers and the doctors of the so urgently needed. We have if I may spell out the four problems which are involved in changing education. We have no pretty difficult tasks. We have to change educational planning. We have to fix this educational planning into the context of the National Economic Development plans you can always tell an underdeveloped country because it has a plan. You have to change their educational systems. You have to make changes in secondary education and its relation to primary education you have to change the nature of the universities. You have to change curricula. You have to make

West Africa stop teaching English poetry all about better deals and things like that and teach West African poetry. If there is anything you have to change teaching techniques for the very simple reason that there aren't enough teachers to teach and those teachers who have been taught to teach and been taught to teach the wrong things to the wrong people. Seems to me we ought to be developing some kind of economists and sociologists and administrators who are prepared to take general principles of analysis into various administrative situations in the poorer countries but don't take ready made solutions. Now this sounds such an obvious statement to make. But I'm ashamed to make it. Were it not for the fact that in a number of underdeveloped countries I have seen such extraordinary things happening. I mean I've seen for it or not seen myself that I have been in an adjoining country so a place where a man has been introducing

a licensing system for public transport which is modeled on that of London. When will the public transport which existed in this country. A lot of broken down lower is left by the American Army and the system of public transport was for a large number of people to climb on to the lorry until it was physically impossible for anybody else to climb on. And the regulations that this man was introducing were based upon the assumption that there were two decker buses with conductors and drivers and people in queues and large number of streets and all the other things which are associated with a highly developed Metropolitan Transport System were far worse things have been happening in education systems as you know. Second it seems to me we have to try and stop sending experts in particular aspects of education. We have all seen I suppose a home economics expert

teaching people in remote villages without electricity how to do refrigerator cooking. We've seen experts in various other fields teaching people to use equipment which only the top 1 percent of the American families can afford to buy. We seen English public school headmasters advising poor countries on how to set up public schools which will develop character and initiative by the great majority of the people of the country are walking around without any clothes to wear and very little food to eat. We have in other words to develop a new source of education a list it seems to me who is prepared to go and analyze the educational problems of these countries from first principles. The first principles being that educational resources are very scarce

that they have to be pretty widely spread and that you have to make the most effective use you possibly can of them. It seems to me we have to get away from academic research and the long term nature in psychology and other disciplines and stop calling this educational research. What we want to develop is research and development techniques or up or operational research techniques. We need to have critique commonsense people who can go in and African school and say well the situation here is that you have one man who can read and write and a thousand people who want to learn and read and write and these following techniques will enable this to be done in a year. Someone who is not in other words the kind of research worker who goes and sits down for

seven years and gets all his can chose right and does a complete statistical test and then comes out with a perfect result to be published in The Journal of analytical psychology leads to the kind of people we should be sending. These are the kind of people we should be financing. And I would it seems to me these points are so obvious and so naive that they're barely worth making. But I think we've all had experience of seeing exactly the reverse in operation in practically every underdeveloped country that we've seen or know about. So. I would just say this if we could. As a result of this and other meetings and other pressure develop small a small number of people who could take their part in teens doing some of these things. Lynn we might possibly get some of these education systems on the

move. That was John Vaizey of the University of London's Institute of Education addressing delegates to the policy conference of the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. From that conference in Washington this is John F. Lewis reporting. You have been listening to one of a series of broadcasts covering highlights of the recent policy conference of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on education in economic development. Your narrator and producer for this 0 0 ECD partnership for progress conference was John F. Lois this program was produced and distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the end of the Radio Network.