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Education in Private Industry.

1975; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Linguagem: Inglês

1548-6192

Lewis M. Branscomb, Paul C. Gilmore,

ICT Impact and Policies

In American industrial circles there is an increasing concern over the intellectual vitality and, more importantly, the intellectual flexibility of industrial personnel. An accelerating pace of social and technical change clearly calls for some form of continuing education for which many of our colleges and universities are not yet effectively organized. The larger corporations are increasingly concerned with viable techniques of management that contribute to stability of employment and con tinued employee effectiveness under full employment policies. General concern for the overall well-being of employees throughout their careers accompanies the general trend toward benefits other than financial compensation. These concerns are bringing industrial education increasingly into contact with elements of what is called a education. Further, largely because they must pay their students a salary, corporations are under even greater economic pressures than conventional educational institutions to increase instructional efficiency. On the academic side, although the balance between vocationalism and liberal education has changed throughout history, it seems inevitable that as the fraction of the high-school-graduate population that goes on to higher education increases, the vocational and professional content in education offerings will rise. This conse quence is also likely to result from intensifying pressures for increased educational productivity and responsiveness. Yet any such trend will result in greater similarity between education in industrial and in academic settings. Further, the combination of the steady extension of the number of years devoted to formal education, the ex pansion of educational opportunity to lower income groups who must work while going to school, and the trend toward marriage before the end of formal education, all will tend to blur the line that once divided the four-year residential college ex perience from the working world of college graduates. Although these trends may lead to renewed interest in the role of the business corporation in educational activity, and even raise some public policy issues that are new to our experience, corporate training of employees is not itself a new phenomenon. Indeed, by 1913 a sufficient number of corporation schools had been formed to lead to the organization of the National Association of Corporation Schools (NACS). Among the companies represented were American Locomotive, American Telephone and Telegraph, Burroughs Adding Machine, Cadillac Motor Car, Carnegie Steel, and Commonwealth-Edison. Even then, corporation schools were going beyond vocational training supplements to the basic education of the public school system. They were attempting to make up for a combination of what were felt to be deficiencies in the public education system and the needs of large numbers of immigrant workers. They offered essentially an elementary school education with courses in English, citizenship, mathematics, and sciences.1 Today