An Operational Research Project on Technical Education

TERMS OF REFERENCE THIS task I have been set by your planning committee is formidable indeed. I am supposed to have been appointed "to survey the general strategy of technical education" in this country, and I am asked to define an operational research project on this subject. Now operational research, as you know, is the application of the method of science to the strategic problems of large and complex systems. The challenge I have received is therefore acceptable in principle; indeed, I can think of nothing more exciting or potentially valuable than to be asked to do this job. However, I am forced to point out that I have been able to do no more than simulate the exercise. For had this summons arrived in fact instead of in supposition, I should have wished to work on it exclusively with a large team of scientists for a long time. As it is, I have had to prepare this paper alone and by night-in the course of founding 'a new company. But I have taken your kind invitation seriously, and hope you will bear with the shortcomings of what I have to say. Please remember that the discussion is pitched at the strategic level: there will therefore be no detailed analysis of figures, no tabular appendices, no international comparisons-with which to frighten the statistically illiterate. What I have tried to do is to reply to this question: how does the whole system work in its socioeconomic context, and what kind of scientific model would describe it? A model is vital, let me say at once, if any attempt is to be made to examine strategic questions; it is the only basis for scientific experimentation when one is not allowed to experiment with the actual situation. Because of this breadth and scope of this undertaking, you may find that critical distinctions which are fundamental to the work of educationalists tend to disappear. For example, I have rarely found it possible to draw distinctions between scientists, technologists and technicians in considering technical evolution as a whole. This is not because I fail to appreciate the difference, but because the three groups are integrally related in any progress or regress that occurs. The other constraint, which is self-imposed, is that the project I am defining ought to be a feasible proposition to implement. It is easy to prescribe massive research into so big a subject as this-but perhaps it could never be completed. Simplifications must be made, and key features identified, if any results are to