Schools and Work: Technical and Vocational Education in France Since the Third Republic

Alexander D. Gregor is director of the Centre for Higher Education
Research and Development at the University of Manitoba and co-editor of
Postsecondary Education in Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

With growing economic globalization, the effective development and
delivery of technical and vocational training has been an increasingly
pressing issue for every national educational system, and for every
level within those systems, from elementary to postsecondary. Education
has historically been very much a national matter, and the resultant
systems tended to reflect the idiosyncratic cultural, political, and
economic circumstances of the individual nation. Accordingly, it has
been difficult to generalize across those systems or to employ the
lessons of any one national setting in another. The new economic
realities, however, require a far greater degree of synchronization
across systems, and the efforts of any one major nation to bring its
training into better alignment with those international patterns has
important potential implications for other comparable nations—even
though the lessons still have to be taken very carefully.

France is a major economic force in Europe and beyond. In this
carefully researched exploration of that country’s efforts to
rationalize its technical and vocational training, Charles Day, a
professor of history at Simon Fraser University, has contributed a
useful new resource for educational and economic planners. At the same
time, he has given us a very interesting piece of social and
intellectual history. French history and traditions have made the issue
of technical and vocational training a particularly challenging one. Its
cultural traditions long prevented that training from being a respected
component of education; its traditional manner of educating the
technological elite did little to foster a coherent system of
technological preparation; and its curious bureaucratic structure
militated against any “system” at all in the broad educational
enterprise, regardless of the political persuasion of the government in
power. Day’s account of struggle to bring that training into the
broader educational enterprise, to link it in an effective way with
business and industry, and to ensure that it did in fact provide a
genuine opportunity for social and economic advancement on the part of
the students involved sheds considerable light on the development of
French society during the last century.