Conclusions of Part II

I. After a period in which numerous, occasionally very ambitious plans for reorganizing the French educational system were developed - none of which, almost without exception, were ever put into practice - reform of the educational system and the schools was begun in earnest, abruptly with the beginning of the Fifth Republic. In this area as in others, the consolidation of power relationships made it possible to move from discussions, deliberations, and planning to decision and implementation.     

Conclusions of Part I

Educational planning, the attempt to adapt the skill structure of the labor force to scientific and technical progress, has failed in Italy for two reasons. The poor political possibilities for implementing planning, including planning in education, have checked attempts to put ideas into practice. Instead, the uncontrolled demand for education has made possible the growth of institutions which planning regarded as being of less urgent importance. Second, the foundations of planning have proven to be unsound, because changes in the job structure have not generally been in the direction of higher qualification; rather, a dual tendency has existed with regard to the need for labor. The continued increase in the need for manpower without any prior specialized training, on the one hand, and the need for a higher level of specialization for a smaller, if increasing, segment of the labor force, on the other, have invalidated the assumption that a general rise in level of qualification would be necessary.     

Conclusions of Part I

I. The comprehensive studies that have been made of French economic and social planning, which includes planning of employment as well as educational planning, have hastened an awareness of the need to promote vocational training research on a systematic basis. Difficulties in coordinating job planning and educational planning - stemming, in particular, from a lack of knowledge of the relation between the institutions that impart skills and those that put such skills to use - gave rise to the realization that some form of government-run institutionalized vocational research was necessary. In 1970 the National Institute for Studies and Research in Occupational Skills (CEREQ) was founded. The CEREQ studies potentially relevant for our present purposes have not yet been completed; therefore, we were unable to include them in our report.     

Editor's Introduction,Part II

Feng Youlan, professor of philosophy at Beijing University, was born in 1895. He is twentieth-century China's foremost philosopher and historian of Chinese philosophy. The present translation is based on part of Feng's Sansong tang zixu (The Hall of Three Pines: A Preface), published by Sanlian shudian in 1984. The author has referred to this work as his "memoirs," but his own introduction explains that the book should also be taken as a preface to the writings of his entire lifetime.