HOUSTON —     My father was in a trade that got displaced, just as many people today face a future where their skills are disappearing. He started out as a typewriter repairman during the World War II years, then went up the ranks of the small business where worked and became its general manager.

An accident landed him in the hospital with a broken arm and soon without a job. That is how he, not really by choice, decided to open his own business.

He did reasonably well, although it was a struggle to compete with larger companies. (Do you remember reading in 1969 the account about Neil Armstrong as the first man to walk on the Moon. The story might have originated from one of my dad’s typewriters rented to NASA for reporters to use.)

Before long, electric typewriters, later calculators — many of them made abroad in Italy, Germany, then Japan — took over the market. Competition was brutal. In the late ‘70s, electronic machines entered the market. My dad retired just as semiconductor digital business machines and computers were taking over in the early ’80s. “Technological displacement” and “automation” left all typewriter shops behind.

Today, most people under 50 think a keyboard is either on a synthesizer or a computer and would hardly think typewriter.

Later, I would go into the computer business for a time, which was not part of my original career path. Heck, the very concept had not been invented when I was in school.

But when AppleWriter and VisiCalc software first became available for mail-order Apple computers, it took only the simplest of deductions to understand they were going to replace typewriters and calculators.

When I opened that first computer store in Dallas, I soon realized the highest demand was not for computers, software or printers.

Customers streamed in wanting classes and to buy how-to books. In a sense, education was the store’s highest profit center. The other revelation was that after spending four years in graduate schools mainly doing statistics projects, they could now buy a software program from me that did the repetitive hard work. It was on sale for only $69.95.

This comes to mind when I see leaders gearing up for another round of school reform. As a Latino watcher, I see groups frequently gear up to champion one new panacea or another, which are often the old problems shrink-wrapped in new packaging.

The education concern is especially acute for Hispanic community advocates who have focused on it for more than a half century as the modus vivendi for development and prosperity. But trying to out-think accepted methods, pedagogies, practices and institutions is a lot of effort to make little difference.   

Yet Latino leaders should worry. With the Hispanic demographic school-age explosion, lagging schooling results can be predicted as new material for scapegoating them if wrong solutions are applied to the right problems. Public opinion is like that. Remember when a multi-billion dollar border wall was going to solve the unauthorized immigration issue?

But just as those computer geeks who sought to self-educate themselves in the early days of computing to solve their own problems, this is a good time for those who profess to advocate for Latinos to become acquainted with Tough Choices or Tough Times : The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. It is the proposed first comprehensive redesign of education in a century. (www.skillscommission.org/)

Like most of us, I benefited from the old schooling system. But that’s not necessarily a good prescription for the future. I also got a lot out of my old Remington, my Olivetti, and my IBM electronic. They gave me excellent service. But then the time came to replace them, not just the ribbon, for a better way.

   [José de la Isla’s latest digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.DayNightLifeDeathHope.com. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at [email protected].]

   © 2009