All walks of life in the national economy need not only a large number of scientists, engineers and management talents, but also tens of millions of highly skilled talents and hundreds of millions of high-quality workers.
China is a manufacturing power, and its industrial added value ranks fourth in the world, but it is not a manufacturing power. There is still a big gap between China and developed countries in manufacturing technology and management level. The main problems are unreasonable industrial structure, weak technological innovation ability, low-end products, low added value, large resource consumption and many accidents in production safety, which are closely related to the low technical quality of employees and the lack of high-skilled talents. With the deepening of economic globalization and the accelerated adjustment and reorganization of the international industrial structure, we should seize the opportunity to improve the level of China's manufacturing industry and make "Made in China" truly competitive in the international market. This must start from the source, pay more attention to and accelerate the development of vocational education, and comprehensively improve the overall quality of human resources.
Vigorously developing vocational education is an important way to promote social employment and solve the problems of agriculture, countryside and farmers.
A large population and a large labor force, especially farmers, are our basic national conditions. Employment is a big problem that cannot be avoided and must be solved in China. At present, about 24 million urban laborers need employment every year, and a large number of rural surplus laborers need to be transferred. To promote social employment, we must develop vocational education and generally improve the employment and entrepreneurial ability of urban and rural labor force. To adapt to the changes in the demand for labor force due to economic and social development, we should take the development of various forms of vocational education as an important measure to promote urban employment. In particular, it is necessary to strengthen the skills training of new laborers and laid-off workers and improve the employment rate in cities and towns.
To solve the problems of agriculture, countryside and farmers, we must coordinate urban and rural areas. On the one hand, it is necessary to guide rural surplus labor to transfer employment to non-agricultural industries and cities and towns, and promote industrialization and urbanization; On the other hand, we should vigorously develop modern agriculture and promote the construction of a new socialist countryside. All these require strengthening vocational education and improving the overall quality of rural labor force. At present, China's rural labor force has a low overall cultural level and lacks vocational skills. While popularizing nine-year compulsory education in rural areas, it is also a major strategic task for China's modernization drive to vigorously develop vocational education and skills training to make farmers adapt to the requirements of industrialization, urbanization and agricultural modernization.
Vigorously developing vocational education is also an inevitable requirement to improve the modern national education system.
What we call vocational education is a general term, including both technical education and technical training, including both vocational education and vocational training, including both secondary vocational education and higher vocational education. Developing vocational education is the inherent requirement of the law of educational development in China. Basic education, vocational education and higher education should be placed in the same important position, with overall consideration and coordinated development. These three aspects complement each other and together constitute the modern national education system in China. In the past, we paid more attention to basic education and higher education, which is necessary and should be done in the future. In recent years, we have realized more and more clearly that we must attach equal importance to the development of vocational education.