This research examines the development and use of job-training stations at the high school level. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background of public-school-and-business cooperation in various areas of vocational and/or distributive education, and then discuss ways in which the structure of distributive education has shifted in recent years, with a view toward forecasting possible lines of future development.
In 1985, when the high-technology revolution was hitting the mass market, some futurists projected that public education would increasingly form working partnerships with private-sector industries to train students for jobs. Some 25% of the nation's high school graduates were in the ranks of the unemployed, "due in part, we feel, to the students' lack of knowledge of specific job skills" (Cetron, Soriano, & Gayle, 1985, p. 7). School-guided part-time work in conjunction with a broadened curriculum, beginning as early as the eighth grade, was seen as a strategy for combining concepts and practical on-the-job training:
What better way to master an idea than to use it in a real-world situation where students can see a purpose for learning it? The actual application of ideas to concrete situations will sharpen their desire to learn and guide them toward suitable careers (Cetron, Soriano, & Gayle, 1985, pp. 7-8).
In recent years, something of the vision of 1985 has begun to take shape in American public education. However, there has historically been an invisible wall at the secondary level between so-called academic studies and vocational studies. In the mid-1980s, there was a strong body of opinion that high school students lacked basic literacy skills, hence widespread advocacy for increasing the academic-course load for all students, including those not intending to go to college. The practical effect of this was to devalue vocational courses of study. In 1985, 11 states counted vocational-course credit ...