In his classic article, “The Vocational School Fallacy in Development
Planning,” Philip Foster argued that attempts in agrarian countries to promote
rural development by using schools to impart practical rural-oriented
knowledge are doomed to fail because villagers invariably see schools mainly
as a means to escape from rural life and get modern-sector urban jobs.1
Villagers quite rationally, therefore, seek to avoid being relegated to rural
educational tracks when academic training provides the possibility of climbing
the educational ladder out of the village. As a result, rural vocational
middle schools are unpopular and face pressure to replace vocational with
academic curricula to prepare students for college entrance examinations.
Education planners would do well to accept the inevitable failure of efforts
to develop rural-oriented curricula, Foster added, because such efforts are
misguided in the first place—rural vocational education has been much less
effective in aiding rural development than its creators had hoped. Rather
than limit avenues of social mobility for ambitious rural youngsters by trying
to impose rural curricula on them, he proposed, educators should improve
the teaching of academic curricula in rural schools. These schools should
concern themselves with imparting basic literacy and numeracy skills and
general academic knowledge that rural youth need in a modernizing world,
and leave vocational and technical training to private initiatives that better
respond to market needs.