Education's smoking gun

Book In treating the issue of long-term manpower forecasting in Chapter 4. the hook rehearses well-known problems with this approach to educational planning: that it assumes fixed coefficients on both supply and demand sides, and that it takes no account of the influence of changes in relative prices on the levels of and the composition of demand for skills. Although the discussion is reasonably well-balanced, some adherents of manpower forecasting will feel that contrary arguments are not given their due weight. The point could have been made, for example, that projections are typically made on the assumption that relative prices remain constant. and that the aim of manpower forecasting is to project likely shifts in the position of the short-term demand curves for different skills, rather than movements along them. Some incorporation of output/employment elasticities is inescapable to this endeavour. Yet prices need not be ignored: wage/employment elasticities can be introduced to illustrate the sensitivity of long-term demand projections to significant changes in the relative price of skills. In those plans where such analysis has been incorporated, demand changes arising from changes in relative prices have appeared to be small in comparison to the impact of output growth on the shifts in demand for skills.’ The second half of the book is in many ways stronger and more interesting than the first. Two chapters reviewing the literature on the costs and financing of education. including recent experiments with cost-recovery and student loan schemes. will prove particularly useful. Equally the analyses of equity considerations in educational investment, and of its interactive effects when combined with interventions in other sectors provide useful commentaries upon recent contributions to these parts of the literature. The book aims to provide both an account of World Bank policy and experience with implementing educational projects, and a dispassionate, even-handed review of research results as regards the linkages between education and development. These objectives although they do not necessarily conflict - nevertheless result in sections which sit uncomfortably together. It is as though those parts of the book which deal explicitly with Bank policy and practice were grafted on, rather awkwardly, at the editorial stage. In spite of these rough edges. however, the later parts of the book well justify its publication. Taken as a whole, it provides a useful reference document for a wide range of issues in educational planning.

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Reviews

Gun. By REGINAL G. New York: Freundlich Books, 1985. 312 pp. U.S.$17.95 (cloth).

Education’s

Smoking

DAMERELL.

THIS 1s a largely

autobiographical polemic against educationists and the schools of education that they control. Damerell’s basic thesis is that all schools of education should be abolished. “Classroom teachers will remain low in status for as long as schools of education exist . .” (p. 272). “The first step toward making elementary school teachers professionals is to abolish schools of education. Only then can we have a new breed of teachers with an active concern for language, the prime teaching tool” (p. 183). Damerell’s evidence comes from his personal experiences. which he generalizes to the whole nation and all schools. He believes that there is a conspiracy among educationists and the education establishment to cover up the dreadful things that go on in education schools. His method is anecdotal; he tells stories and cites others that support his views. This book provides nothing useful for the serious scholar or critic of education. This is unfortunate, because education is one of our important professions, and as such deserves serious criticism, based not on prejudice and references to authorities with whom the author happens to agree. but on evidence and analysis. To paraphrase the author, in his critique of Horace’s Compromise: “To call (Education’s Smoking Gun) a report is a sheer conceit”. Damerell wrote it based on his own experience as a faculty member in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The book is well written and should be read as entertainment, not as serious scholarship. JOHN FOLGEK

Vanderbilt University

Education and National Development: A Comparative Perspective. By INCEMAR FACERLIND

and LAWRENCE J. SAHA. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983. 237 pp. U.S.$32 (cloth), U.S.$13 (paper).

NOTES for example, LOCKHEED, M.. JAMISON, D. and LAW. L. Farmer education and farmer efficiency: a survey. Economic Development and Culrural Cha&e, Vol. 29. DD. 37-76. October 1980. 2. See, for’example, Manpower and Employmenl in Botswana, Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, Gaborone, Botswana. 1973. I. See,

CHRISTOPHER COLCLOUGH

University of Sussex, England

DISKEGAWING the table of contents, this book essentially consists of two parts: Chapters l-7, where the authors review every possible theory on the relationship between education and development; and the last two chapters where the authors attempt to put some order in the preceding complex inter-disciplinary chaos by providing their own typology. My overall assessment is that the book has been more successful in the first rather than the second part. In reviewing existing theories of education and social change their authors use actual country case studies to