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You
are here:
Campaign Against American E-Partheid
If you have wondered and worried about the life style implications of the information technology explosion on youth, their socioeconomic viability, and the need for radically different educational interventions for their survival, you're not alone.
World news, with only flashes in the U.S. press, tells the tragic story of two fourteen and fifteen year old boys, Yaguine and Fode, who as brave and desperate stowaways in the landing gear of an airplane leaving their native Guinea for Belgium, gave their lives to deliver a handwritten letter to European heads of state, begging for access to a better life for themselves as young Africans and other would-be immigrants from the southern hemisphere. Their lives and deaths are but an all too real metaphor for the darker children of the world seeking opportunity in today's global economy.
Without comparably graphic drama, but with comparable implications, there are millions of homegrown Yaguine's and Fode's trying to find access into the bounty of the other America's selectively accessible Information Age. Statistics, from Falling Through the Net III, just released by the US Commerce Department and other authoritative reports, powerfully show the accelerating tragedy of poor and ethnic young people in our country, too purposeless, too neglected, too unlettered and too residentially isolated to be part of the cyber careers that bypass society's default warehouses of morgues and prisons. In the face of unprecedented prosperity, tax surpluses and the collapse of public education as the universal ladder to success, even the obvious is easily overlooked. Our wired nation cannot fully prosper, if half of our population is inadvertently left off-line!
The Y2K forecast for America will be disastrous in fact, unless there is a dramatic and massive U-turn from the emerging caste system that regardless of merit condemns those without information technology (IT) skills to economic wastelands or the criminalized laws of supply and demand. Not only is there help on the way, relevant help is already here, if our collective will can be aroused in time to embrace it.
It's not just that the problem is obvious, the solution can be also. We have at our disposal a tried and proven vehicle by which to reverse the emerging technological e-partheid in America. Intensive training, in and out of school buildings, by caring techno-literate mentors who treat young people as uniquely creative beings rather than passive statistics. Instead of gambling on beneficial effects from hundreds of tax-dollar millions misinvested in youth-oriented "Just Say No" campaigns and their DNA progeny in anti-drug public service ads, there needs to be a war on "Artificial Ignorance". This AI can be defined as the indifferent, willful or negligent failure to address IT access and training for at-risk youth, who are ready, willing, and able to join in the exciting potentials of the networked society.
At the forefront of the war on Artificial Ignorance for five years, my colleagues and I at the Urban Technology Center have perfected a "Future Centers" template with an 80% success rate through the delivery of quality IT training at the 4th grade reading level in both English and Spanish, which is ripe for ubiquitous applications.
Our "Future Centers" strategy calls for the introduction of IT training exactly where it is most scarce and most needed in neighborhoods and the institutions belonging to the poor and ethnic minorities. When we come in, we do not view ourselves in the discredited traditions of missionaries among pagans, but as skilled facilitators at the disposal of local aspirations for self help empowerment. Once we've listened to the community's statement of needs, we provide a responsive range of state-of-art hardware and software options. We've learned to prepackage and oversee the installation of all of the required equipment and programs at bulk purchase cost; provide on-site training for community members to own, administer and maintain the project; offer appropriate courseware, with 24-hour help lines; and we assist with quality control and periodic evaluations for consistency and ongoing improvements. We are now poised to offer these same courses and services on-line with the option of our off-site managing of all the technical delivery requirements to participating centers. Simultaneously, we seek to create a collaborative of educators, psychologists, parents, and community leaders to identify and develop enriched programming content that can and will attract youngsters with diversity educational materials that teach social intelligence as well as skills.
While we are far from alone in the field, and operate with far less than optimal resources than optimal, we are among the few providers, who have made it a business to selectively use the lack of social and economic status as an asset rather than a liability in reaching young people through integrated learning systems. Through offering turnkey training in word processing, website design, desktop publishing, spreadsheet accounting, to PC repair with optional advanced certifications and accredited degrees, we have motivated young people to learn to think of themselves professionally at 35 such Future Centers across this nation making a new paradigm of esteem based on what they have learned over what they wear, for a value system conversion.
While there are numerous examples of grassroots guerrilla efforts afoot to introduce programs of IT technology to youngsters, the challenge is one of rapid acceleration to the required scale to be commensurate with the level of the need. Here the use of guerrilla tactics is less an appropriate strategy to meet the full scale requirements of the millions suffering from AI deficiencies. Typically ad hoc techniques are notoriously lacking in the quality controls required to meet uniform industry standards of the globally seamless job market. Furthermore stand alone projects only increase the time and repetitive cost needed to constantly reinvent the wheel to demonstrate programmatic success. And because of fragmented support, only a fraction of those who would benefit can be reached by sporadic approaches.
We have found that while there must be sufficient flexibility for programs to be responsive to individual student needs, the competencies involved are national rather than local. It is against this reality that we at UTC have structured our curricula to meet uniform industry skills using the best practices of our multi-city experience. Therefore our curricula has been developed to be "high touch" as well as high tech. And the results speak for themselves when individual participants not only learn new skills but learn greater self esteem and collective responsibility simultaneously.
As part of the strategy of scale, wholesale rather than retail efforts require the mobilization of organizational networks as well as isolated pilot projects. Accordingly, national organizations and group affiliations of every description can be the most promising tools yet through which to mobilize already widely available resources and willing IT mentoring volunteers. Toward this end, various large scale membership organizations willing to adopt this as an agenda item will go a long way toward matching the pervasive scope of the problem, because they extend to every city and hamlet in the land due to the universal American reach of volunteer associations.
Ours is not a mystery program, it's just a carefully tailored IT training solution that ties the individual to a group and proves the hidden economic and social worth of those involved. There is no reason in America why every established faith-based institution, community organization, multi-family housing unit or community engaged public schoolhouse should not have a Future Center strategy for youth as well as the not-so-young seeking relevance to IT needs and opportunities of the 21st Century. This is the only sure people approach by which we can take charge of guaranteeing an economic and technological literacy for the millions of those falling through the net into a needless caste of "economic and intellectual untouchables."
The memory of Yaguine and Fode and those like them requires us all to make the most of our time and effort to reshape the future. A mind is not only a "terrible thing to waste," but conversely there is no earthly excitement that exceeds the opening of a closed mind to new ways to make use of itself. The Y2K challenge to our country is greater than dodging a cybernetic bullet, it involves turning keyholes into archways that can penetrate barriers to access to information and technological literacy.
Those of us who care about America's restless young people cannot afford to behave just like we have given up on them, sitting around wringing our hands, nay saying and blaming others for their plight. The solutions are collectively in our hands. In spite of the Y2K doomsayers, it's not yet too late and it will only become so, if we do nothing of practical and pragmatic importance in the meanwhile.
Ideally this is the kind of broad-based IT campaign against emerging American e-partheid that the sports and entertainment celebrities as well as the millionaires and zillionaires of the world can be aroused to support, and as they realize that their futures also depend on such successes, they will. But in the meanwhile, it remains for the little people, like you and me, to make the difference.
I ask you to find a receptive organization to which you belong or a site near where you live a business, civic, or social group, a faith institution, recreation center, school, or residential area that can double as a Future Center sponsor. Call us, and we will work with you to put feet on your aspirations. E-mail me with your interests and concerns and I will be glad to respond with practical action items.
Timothy Jenkins is currently chairman and chief executive officer of Unlimited Vision, Inc. Multi-media and the former publisher of the Smithsonian's America's Visions magazine. Jenkins earned his Juris Doctor Degree from Yale University Law School and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University. Timothy Jenkins can be reached at tjenkins@charm.net
Copyright © October 1999 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
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