Educational Planning and Unemployed Youth

In his booklet Archibald Callaway, with his long experience of juvenile unemployment in developing countries, changes the picture by insisting that the solution does not lie with education alone, or perhaps even primarily. ‘Of first priority, then, are significant-or even drastic-modifications in the functioning of economies. ’ The economic planner, that is to say, must do his long-range planning with one eye on the growth of the GNP and the other on the effects of his plans on employment and unemployment, and, through them, on education; the adjustments among all these factors must be mutual. In this process the educational planner has a vital part to play, because he knows better than anyone else that a growing school system behaves very differently in some ways from a growing industry. Schools are often extremely resistant to qualitative changes, and, even for quantitative expansion, the ‘lead time’ may be much longer than for, say, a set of factories; but an educational system, once it really starts to expand in a developing country starved of capital and of markets, can pour out graduates (of a kind) much faster than industry can create jobs to meet their expectations. A superfluous factory, moreover, can be closed down or converted to a new purpose, but rarely can a school be closed, for it arouses in parents and pupils a clamant demand for the process of education, however laggard the demand for its products and however irrelevant the training may be to the needs of the community. The phenomenon of the educated unemployed springs from something more complex than a mistake in arithmetic.