I'm sure that's right, and I'm all for getting computers to do much more.
About my wacky suggestion to retrain the unemployed as teachers, Jay is
right: the university hurdle that has to be cleared in order to get
certified as a teacher would be insuperable for most of the unemployed.
However, while I was being totally unrealistic in terms of current
arrangements I wasn't being entirely frivolous. Given a hard-to-imagine
society in which the upbringing and education of young people were a social
priority, and an acknowledgement of the fact that many people who would
never be teachers under the present system nevertheless have a great deal
to offer -- and not just on the "affective" side or in sports and hobbies
-- ways could be found by which many currently unemployed people could be
usefully and satisfying employed within the organised experience provided
for the young.
If the structure of work within education (broadly conceived) allowed for a
range of roles and modes rather than resting on the crude
certified/non-certified dichotomy, and being an education worker meant at
all points a two-part involvement, first with the education of young people
and second with one's own continuing education; if university professors
were in and out of schools, holding seminars with teachers (and kids in
some cases) -- sometimes about the content that the teachers are teaching,
sometimes not -- and if access to higher education and research discourses
were not only attainable by passing through certain formidable portals but
were around, visible and accessible within the working environment of the
school (or whatever the youth places would be called); then one could
imagine a significant proportion of currently unemployed people, having
been admitted to that network as workers, becoming able gradually to expand
their contribute as they developed themselves educationally, acquiring over
years the necessary habitus for doing a good pedagogic job with kids -- a
habitus that may not be quite the same as the one that's called for now,
though not entirely different either.
However, this is all very speculative and I'm not proposing to get into it
in a big way in this context; in terms of the important topic of this
thread it's a distraction, for which I apologise.
Pete
Peter Medway
Linguistics & Applied Language Studies
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa On K1S 5B6
Canada
Phone 613.520.2600 ext 2811
Fax 613.520.6641