This book provides an insight into the history and current professional situation as well as the practice of vocational teaching across a number of selected countries. As often occurs in comparative studies, there is no ultimate wisdom behind the selection of countries, but we hope that we have achieved the gathering of a critical mass of countries, which build a contrastive sample for what currently happens in the field. Despite the fact that a more problem-based approach to the comparison of various aspects of vocational teachers' professional situation would be more exciting to the reader at the first glance, we decided to take this country-based descriprive approach when making this book. The reason for that is that there is still a fundamental lack of information when it comes to vocational teachers on an international scale. So any more in-depth study into one of the sub-aspects of vocational teaching is not really possible at the moment, since the contextual information is missing. The more substantial volumes on the topic on the international level date back 30 years or more (see also Tables 13.1 and 13.2 in the Appendix, Int- national Labour Organisation, 1964; UNESCO, 1973; Vivian and Hoffman, 1967).
