Having gained an overall sense of computer technology and its place in society, it's relatively easy to add whatever applied knowledge and skills are appropriate to your line of work. In the examples I gave earlier, application skills would include computer graphics and taxonomy, and applied knowledge would include computer systems in business administration and computer languages for office systems. Certainly, an interdisciplinary education is advisable for maximum flexibility. To a certain extent, people are going to have to tailor their own education programs to adapt their knowledge in whatever is their discipline - economics, architecture, marketing, etc. - to the computer-age context.

But that activity is also part of the new approach that I see is needed. Just as we must abandon the notion of people passively filling essentially fixed job descriptions and think in terms of their more actively pursuing an evolving work career, so we must abandon the notion of people passively digesting a fixed educational prescription and think in terms of their actively taking charge of their own continuing education. In other words, education as something you graduate from at the age of 18 or 21 is being replaced by education as a life activity, rather than fitness and flossing one's teeth.

As a delinquent in the areas of fitness and flossing myself, I can attest to the difficulty of changing basic habits and assumptions about life. But the need to change has been argued for a long time. In a book published in 1970, for instance, Margaret Mead maintained that the present is no longer an extension of the past, but a kind of explosion of the future into our faces. In preparing young people for the world, she reasoned, it's no longer appropriate to teach them what to learn, but how to learn.

To instill this, what is essentially a personal empowering approach to education, she suggested a dialogue model, with students participating in their own education, and thereby taking charge of it for their ongoing growth and development in the workforce. What does this approach to education involve? It involves teaching good research skills; counseling, rather than dictating; and counseling to join professional and craft associations, subscribe to journals, and to form self-help groups, such as the Women's Networks which are being organized across Canada.

The dialogue model for participation in change would also help women to deal with the deep-seated socialization patterns which orient women toward, and then confine them in, support-type jobs as the only appropriate "women's work" available to them. Eradicating this pattern is as important as education and job redesign in ensuring that women have a place in the ranks of those exercising initiative and control in the computer age, and are not left behind, buried by automation.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my research. The most clear-cut example is in what happened when the office of the future was introduced to the Information Systems department of a large Canadian company, the first department in the company's five-year plan to extend the electronic information system throughout the corporate structure. Over the course of the transition in the Information Systems department, the number of clerical employees fell by 130, while the number of professional-managerial employees increased by 110. Only two of the redundant clerical workers were moved up to the professional- managerial ranks. The rest were given lateral transfers to yet unautomated departments.

When I asked the personnel official what he planned to do when he ran out of the lateral-transfer option, he shrugged, in what I thought was a rather cavalier manner, "Well, I guess they'll go to wherever redundant clerical workers go." I had an image of a kind of refuse heap out back, into which these women would be dumped. This man saw, or chose to see these women strictly as support staff and incapable of anything else.

In the other example, also in the same company, there were two secretaries left in the Information Systems department after all the automation was introduced, one working for the head of the department. Well, with the scope of automation described earlier, you can predict that traditional secretarial work fills up not even half her time. Most of her time, it turned out when I asked her to describe her work, is spent doing information brokerage and systems administration work. When I heard her describing this computer-enhanced work, I thought, "Oh good, they've turned this into a management training position." But no. When I asked her boss whether this was indeed a management training position, he seemed almost shocked at the suggestion.