ABSTRACT
To what extent and in what ways does education prepare young people for work? It has often been argued, most famously perhaps by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in the United States, that a close correspondence exists between education and work in a capitalist society (Bowles and Gintis, 1976). On the other hand, over the past decade it has become more common to argue that there is a close correlation between education and work in a very different sense. On this second view, it is the failure of the education system to prepare youth for the 'world of work' that is said to be directly responsible for the economic and industrial difficulties facing the UK. The further implication of this is that educational reform will lead directly to renewed economic and industrial growth. Both of these viewpoints share the basic premise that there is a 'tight fit', a relatively straightforward and direct correlation, between education and work. This chapter will inspect the grounds for this view by focusing on recent historical research in this area, first to discuss the different historical perspectives that have developed over the past decade, and then to examine in more detail the historical experience of technical schooling in Britain.
