How can we stem the tide? Those familiar with the technology field increasingly stress that we must improve education and training. And education needs to start at the lowest levels. Quite by accident, I spoke, within the same two days, to three outstanding businesspeople-engineers -- Lewis Branscomb, chief scientist and vice-president at IBM Corp.; Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Intel Corp.; and Robert Charpie, president of Cabot Corp. All three expressed grave concern about inadequacies in our elementary and secondary schools and our colleges. All three stressed that education must be our first priority if we are to recover our technology leadership.
Our schools certainly need plenty of help. Other nations do better both at the technical training all youngsters receive and at the training of that specially talented handful who go on to specialize in advanced electronics. We need to do much more, much better. And we dare not provide technical training at the expense of the liberal arts curriculum. It is liberal arts education that gives the best grounding in the ability to learn, change, and adapt -- the very qualities on which we must rely most heavily.
While almost every community can use help for its schools, the unemployed adult world needs help just as badly. When it comes to retraining masses of adults, most towns and cities lack even the institutional framework that the schools provide for educating youngsters.
It is clearly easier to educate young people about computers than it is to educate adults. Nevertheless, we must fight to put as much money and effort as possible into simultaneously teaching unemployed adults eomputer skills. One effective way of accomplishing this goal may be to train part of our vast pool of welleducated retirees as volunteer computer teachers. They could then teach younger adults who are out of work and who must acquire new, more usable skills.
Just about every job worth having in a few years will require knowledge of how to use a computer. Factory managers and workers will need to use robotics or numeric control of machining. Office managers and workers will need to know how to use word processors or to access databases. What we must build quickly is a rnulti-literate, multi-skilled work force. We have a long way to go. A national study found no more than 80% of the work force "functionally literate," that is, able to use reading and writing in their daily lives. We obviously have far less "computer literacy." If you exclude those who use the computer only for entertainment, probably no more than 4 million Americans are computer literate, according to Future Computing Inc., a Richardson, Tex., market research firm.
As unemployment mounted during the last year, public officials, in town after town, would ask, "What exactly can we do to attract new business and make new jobs that we're not doing?" I learned to stress these three steps: First, make your town or city one of the first to achieve 100% computer literacy. Second, as best you can, get people to think of unemployment as a natural, necessary time for retraining. Given the rate of technological change, more and more people will be shocked to find themselves displaced and needing to upgrade their skills. Permanent retraining must be built into the economy. Unless jobs await the retrained, even that will not work. Finally, we must understand that we can't make as many economically worthwhile jobs as we need without creating new businesses or helping existing ones to grow more rapidly.
In addition to increasing the number of computer literate U.S citizens, we have another pressing national need -- to create public policies that expand small business, entrepreneurship, and, therefore, jobs. Not long ago, a leading officer of a major U.S. multinational corporation made clear why expanding small business is an essential goal. Speaking about the foreign competition his company faced from low wage areas he said that his company had three business choices. It could 'emigrate, automate, or evaporate." He anticipated that it was likely to do a little if each. In 1981, Fortune 500 companies employed 600,000 fewer Americans than they had in 1979. If we want the government to be the employer of last, not first, resort, then obviously new, smaller growing companies will have to be equipped to provide the jobs we need.
Here, too, computers and computer literacy play a part. Whatever management edge large companies have had over smaller ones is being eliminated technologically. The microcomputer is as much an equalizer as the handgun was in the old western showdown between the burly villain and the puny, otherwise overmatched, hero.
Every business must be able to prepare plans swiftly and to vary assumptions about each element in them. Until recently, such planning was beyond the resources and ability of small-company owners and managers. The all-important contingency plan, allowing the owner to deal quickly with unexpected events, was rare, even in well-run small companies. It was just too hard to draw one up. With the microcomputer, such planning is feasible, even easy. Soon it will be standard practice. These new management strengths will, sooner or later, show up in higher survival and growth rates for small companies and in more cost-cutting innovations.
There is plenty for each of us to do to promote technological education and advancement. We need not turn the United States into a pale version of "Japan Inc." Our strong suit is entrepreneurship, not bureaucracy. But what Japan learned must be relearned by the hundreds of thousands of American community leaders who will form our consensus-making engine.
These grass-roots leaders will move us forward steadily, once they make up their minds about the direction we must take. In the meantime, we can take heart from The Washington Post's annual survey of things and people that were "in" or "out" as the old year ended. It turns out that "computer literacy" is on the "in" list, along with "hanging upside down" and "goat cheese." We don't have a thing to worry about.
