England has failed to create a stratum of technical school education in the 20th century. It is increasingly being recognized that educational defects have contributed to England's relative decline and laggard economic performance compared with European competitors. Although junior technical schools were founded in the early 1900s and secondary technical schools were established after 1945, they have been abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s. This has been in contrast to many of England's industrial competitors in Europe and elsewhere. The lack of this stratum has left England with shortages of skilled labor even in times of high unemployment. It has also left England with a culture that emphasizes high quality making and doing rather less than some rivals. The lack of this stratum helps explain the present unsatisfactory attempts to reintroduce "technology" as an ill-defined subject into an educational system that had rejected it. This lies near the heart of England's malaise about its industrial economy, education, and cultural values. (The book contains 51 tables, 31 pages of endnotes, a selected bibliography listing 283 sources, and an index.) (YLB)