The effect of technical innovation on education is two-fold: Education is influenced by new technical developments and also by efforts to catch up with new techniques, The present article aims to study the second aspect empirically based on the results of the case study in the steam power plants.
The conclusions of the study can be summarized as follows:
1) A study on automated power plants in Japan indicates that the educational attainments of the workers at such plants, which is usually very high at the time of their inauguration, rapidly declines as they become more experienced. Also, wide educational gaps that normally exist among holders of different positions disappear as they acquire sufficient experience with the new equipment, resulting in a largely uniform educational level among the workers.
2) The above findings suggest that experience with new equipment (onthe-job self-training) and educational attainments (school education) are substitutive for each other, Therefore, it may be assumed that a specific job always requires a fixed level of capability which include those two elements.
3) On the basis of empirical studies in many countries, the author demonstrates that the above hypothesis is universally applicable without regard to race, religion, and geographical area, It is also mentioned that the question of technical innovation vs. education should be studied not only from the angle of school education but also in connection with the total technical capability including on-the-job experience and training, It is further stressed that the more active technical innovation is in a society, the higher the educational attainments of its members tends to be.
