from the report of the International Conference on Education (33rd Session) of the International Bureau of Education. It deals with (i) the role of higher education institutions in national development, (ii) improving and sustaining the competence of educators and (iii) managing the system of education.
The final report of the International Conference on Education (33rd Session) of the International Bureau of Education held at Geneva 15th-23rd September 1971 has an important section on higher education which reads as follows:
The role of higher education institutions in national development
Higher education was expanding more rapidly than any other level of education and, at the same time, in developing countries, higher education institutions were trying to move away from the academic concept of education for its own sake and to concentrate on the preparation of high-level manpower to assist in national development. The Conference felt, however, that one of the major problems of higher education was its continuing failure in many countries, both developed and developing, to adjust to national requirements. Higher education was deficient in this respect in both qualitative and quantitive terms; it produced on the one hand graduates whose training did not equip them to perform the tasks the nation expected of them; on the other hand, elsewhere graduates in such numbers that they could not be absorbed by the economy. The importance of the relevance of high-level training to the national economy was stressed repeatedly.
Attention was again called to the conflict described in the working document, between the traditional academic university education and the more modern, technologically-biased type of higher training. The prestige