The New International Economic Order is a planned global economy that requires redistribution of production and consumption, such that each country of the world will have sound and sustainable economic growth. Ultimately, in order to effect such a redistribution, almost total control of the work force is necessary.
Thus, the use of the school program to train workers of the future has become a focus of national and international attention, placing a heavy burden on the educational systems of the world. It is only through the education system that this, or any, country can so manage the means and relations of production and consumption. Therefore, it may be said that the purpose of the restructured school program, as established for the New International Economic Order, is for the training of Human Resource Units for the Global Workforce of the future.
Vocational training has had a limited role in the school curriculum for many decades, dating back to manual arts and commercial programs that were a direct result of the Industrial Revolution. However, from a traditional perspective, the best vocational training is thought to be a solid general education the the academic disciplines. This general education view of vocational training is based on the Human Capital Theory of productivity. Simply put, the Human Capital Theory states that any increase in knowledge improves the individual's productivity. Thus, from a vocational standpoint, a formal general education has been viewed as the most important investment in human capital, one that would pay dividends to both employer and employee over time. A casual relationship may be seen in the figure below:
A contrasting theory of productivity was introduced in the late 1960s – the Filter Theory. According to the Filter Theory, formal education, ie general knowledge, contributes little, if anything, to a worker's productivity. Instead, productivity depends on the nature of the job itself. With the Filter Theory general knowledge is, therefore, less important than the practical skills that the worker acquires primarily in the course of his employment. Hence, according to the Filter Theory, the purpose of the school program is first and foremost to act as a screen to filter people into this jobs that fit with the needs of the global economy and away from those that do not. The sequence of the new system is as follows:
Whereas the traditional system is geared to personal initiative and preference, the new system is based upon the needs of business. The individual is lost in the shuffle.
Although the vocational program of the New International Economic Order draws predominately from the Filter Theory, the Human Capital Theory is not totally abandoned. It is simply adapted to fit the behavioral orientation of the new Life-long Education Paradigm. According to the UNESCO publication, Foundations of Lifelong Education, the traditional knowledge orientation notwithstanding, nothing in the Human Capital Theory ”... prevents those components of labour productivity that are imparted by schooling from being partly (or wholly) identical with the attitudes (as opposed to the aptitudes) demanded of the different categories of workers by the capitalist division of labour..."
As can be seen, the vocational aspects of the school program emanate from the New International Economic Order and are organized under the complex life role of Producer. The determinants of the program are Vocational Indoctrination, Vocational Limitation and Vocational Training.