Preface

Abstract

This study on "Educational Planning and Secondary School Reform in Italy" is concerned with planning and research in vocational-technical education; the relation between the acquisition of specific skills, and scientific and technical progress is dealt with explicitly as a problem of special relevance. In every case planning in education is premised on particular assumptions about technological development that serve as direct justification for changes in school organization. A paramount question in this regard is whether the evaluations of technical and social development in Italy upon which education planning is based, are borne out empirically. The basic postulates for the expansion of educational institutions, worked out in a period of intensive economic growth (1), must be measured against the results of an analysis of job structure, as well as of pilot experiments in educational planning oriented toward the actual use of acquired skills in the labor process. In addition to these results and their consequences for the school system, in this investigation we shall also draw on studies that have developed approaches to raising general technical competence above the level regarded as strictly necessary and to reorganizing labor in a way implied by such progress.