ABSTRACT
The White Paper risks going into the blind alley of vocationalising Secondary Education, although neither international research nor the big donor agencies give much credit to this approach. The English Technology Education Project 1985–88 recommends that technology education should develop concepts, methods and skills, and that technological tasks should be designed to draw on the potential resources of knowledge and skills from the other subjects of the curriculum. The D&T approach should not be misused for producing an illusion of a low cost solution to technology education in developing countries. The necessary investment in D&T teacher training and new multipurpose workshops for all secondary schools is probably not much cheaper than using and improving the existing resources in Technical Institutes and similar institutions. The comparative advantage of developing countries cannot be seen in automation, but in lower costs of labour.
