Over the past four years Australia has seen a dramatic change in careers work within secondary schools from traditional vocational guidance interviews and information collection to the teaching of structured career education programs. Career education associations have been formed and resource materials have been produced by teachers and by government departments. Whilst enthusiasm at the grass roots level has produced many and varied responses to career education concepts originally promulgated in the United States and Britain, the disparity in time and facilities allocated for careers work, and the differing backgrounds of the teachers and other workers in the field make it extremely difficult to give a precise or comprehensive account of what career education means in Australia. This paper examines several programs produced in Australia for secondary schools in terms of the modifying factors of time allocation, curriculum style and theoretical bias, and points to some of the problems that may confront career educationists in the near future.
The transition from secondary schooling to employment offers to many students a marked change in life-style and outlook. It is the passport to greater sexual freedom, to more subtle social competition and to a more complex concept of leisure. This paper suggests that students need both formal and informal preparation for such changes through the provision of a comprehensive guidance program that both encourages a closer informal relationship between staff and students and offers a link between school, external guidance agencies and employers as well as curriculum preparation for social change. The paper looks at the work that has been done in this area in Australia and suggests that employers as well as schools have a role to play in the facilitation of the transfer to employment. It is suggested that improvements in both school and employer provisions may require some prior reappraisal of the aims of education.
BOOK REVIEWS tional plans in the near future and a scale of academic self-rating constitute the "basic" variables for the age-16 personal factors. Measures of classroom behaviour, self-esteem, engagement in social activities, and engagement in humanistic activities are treated as "others". How are the latter four variables less basic than the former two? The reader is left unsatisfied on this point. Second, sex is used as a control variable in the MCA for every block. Why? Rosier's answer is that sex is important for policy-making, since boys and girls are treated differently at home, in school, and in society at large. True, but so are upper-class and lower-class children, high and low achievers, etc., but they are not included as universal control variables. Third, it is clear that if all variables in the block had been included in the compound, the age-16 personal factors might have been found to be stronger than the age-14 factors (as one would expect), and Rosier's conclusion that encouragement at age 16 is too late might have been different, even if it is sound advice for other reasons.At issue here is a basic problem, namely the development of any conceptual framework as a logically complete and consistent structure and the relationship between this structure and statistical analysis. The policy issues Rosier deals with are very complex, and existing theoretical models are inadequate. At a number of points, therefore, the statistical analysis exhibits only tenuous relation to any logically consistent structure.Despite the difficulties Rosier faces, this study clearly represents a methodological contribution to the literature because it specifies a conceptual framework on which later model development and statistical analysis can be built. That was his aim. Rosier's care in explaining the perspectives from which he writes helps us to understand why he did what he did, and in so doing we understand better the complex research situation often prevailing in the field of education.
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