From Handicraft to High Technology - The Transformation of the Swedish forestry Vocational Educationa and Training 1940-1990

Författare

Fay Lundh Nilsson

Summary, in English

Forestry has been one of the major industries in the Swedish economy since the middle of the nineteenth century. During the second part of the twentieth century the industry went through powerful technological changes. Traditional handicraft methods were replaced by modern high technology. As for the forestry VET this meant a strong expansion during the 1950s and 1960s followed by integration into upper secondary school from the 1970s and onwards. As an analytical framework a structural-analytic perspective has been used that says that the Swedish economy has been through several intermittent phases – each one of about 20 years of length. This study shows that these phases had an important effect on changes in technology which in turn brought on changes in the organization of forestry VET. When rationalisation was necessary in the 1950s and 1960s there was a need for mass education. When a new transformation phase started in the beginning of the 1970s there was need for new, more extensive knowledge, about the new and often very expensive machines. Today the machines are computer-based and the education is prolonged to three years. One of the main problems today is to recruit young people to the forestry programs.

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