Dealing with redundancy: will universal education in a free-market economy survive?

MORE THAN A HALF CENTURY AGO, KURT VONNEGUT PUBLISHED his first novel, Player Piano, which depicted the rise of robotics and computers. Today, academics who find 21st century currency in Vonnegut's futuristic take on the economy are confirmed by the current jobless recovery. In fact, recently, when I attended a seminar for Philadelphia-area academics, a Thomson eLearning representative asserted, "Relentless efficiency in manufacturing processes is the reason this is a jobless recovery." The speaker's solution was this: Higher education must teach ever more sophisticated skills.

But how sophisticated? How much education is enough? Player Piano postulated a futuristic America in which all those with real jobs held Ph.Ds, and everybody else--the vast majority who did poorly on National General Classification Tests--waited on tables, staffed retail counters, or manned the road-repair crews. In other words, the vast majority were redundant. They held "make work" jobs to make ends meet.

Now, in 2004, as the North American Free Trade Agreement marks its 10th birthday, Vonnegut's America Looms visibly on our horizon. At February's 34-nation Summit of the Americas, President Bush backpeddled regarding his proposal to extend NAFTA to the entire Western Hemisphere. While Mexican President Vicente Fox gave Bush's plan lukewarm lip service, less compliant presidents such as Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, called for trashing Bush's free-trade mantra in favor of anti-poverty programs aimed directly at ending the glaring economic disparities which blight Central and South America. In the U.S., where class distinctions have never been drawn with the same bright lines as in Europe or the developing world, public policy tends to ignore the growing income gap between our wealthiest citizens and the rest of our citizenry.

And what of NAFTA's legacy to date? The U.S. Department of Labor has certified 412,177 American workers as NAFTA casualties. Most of these former incumbents of high-paid manufacturing positions now scrape by, working low-paid service jobs. Is it any wonder then that today, Wal-Mart is the nation's largest employer?

Listen for Vonnegut's player piano tinkling on the PA system the next time you shop your local Sam's Club; the tune is getting louder. White the world's remaining manufacturing jobs now migrate from Mexico to China to Southeast Asia in pursuit of ever-lower wage scales, robotics and computer science (as Vonnegut presciently predicted) are eliminating many such positions forever. Meanwhile, such sophisticated specialties as software development, and even paralegal services, are also being shifted from the U.S. to India, and elsewhere in the developing world. Indian systems analysts, educated in the U.S., are actually engaged in a reverse migration back home to their own subcontinent.

America has pinned its hopes on universal education in a free-market economy, but these hopes are in danger of being dashed, for at least three reasons:

1--Universal education remains an elusive dream. When I recently told the CEO of a Baltimore-based foundation that Arizona's governor was criticized on National Public Radio for the state's 40 percent high school graduation rate, he replied, "In Baltimore city we'd be thrilled to hit 40 percent in our public school system."

2--The states" current fiscal crises are forcing public universities to cut back just when population pressures demand more classroom seats. The mantra of my colleagues at public universities is, "We once were state supported, then we were merely state affiliated. Now, we are nothing more than state located." Thus, many of those young Americans who do persist to a high school diploma and are academically qualified to pursue high education may find the cost prohibitive, or at least discouraging.

3--Globalization and the Worldwide Web will keep right on conspiring against geographically based jobs, no matter how quickly we create them. Merrill-Lynch recently estimated that "fifty percent of the average employee's skills become outdated every three to five years."

Perhaps we in higher education should be planning now for a large, permanent strata of redundant population, a la Vonnegut's vision. Such planning goes against a 500-year Puritan work ethic that stiff shuns the dole in favor of welfare-to-work programs. Clearly, our situation requires rethinking the role of education. As this century moves ahead, high schools, colleges, and universities will be required to prepare people to pursue satisfying lives which may--or increasingly may not--be career centered. In 1952, The New York Times wrote of Vonnegut, "His black logic gives us something to laugh about and much to fear." A half-century later, I hear little laughter as the prayer piano sounds its fearful tune.

James Ottavio Castagnera, a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, is the associate provost at Rider University and president of the Pinnacle Employment Law Institute, an organization dedicated to social justice in the global workplace.