Teaching Futuristics*

Arthur B. Shostak, Ph.D.

Negative stereotypes about working-class Americans abound, thanks in large part to colorful and irascible TV figures like "Archie Bunker," "Ralph Cramden," and "Kramer" of the Seinfeld Show. When you add the media's preoccupation with the inexcusable missteps of certain notorious blue-collar union leaders (the Teamsters' Jackie Presser and Jimmy Hoffa come immediately to mind), it would seem that working-class unionists would not be a very promising group for a college-credit course in futuristics (or much else, for that matter).

Determined to put the lie to that costly image, the AFL-CIO in 1974 opened the nation's only union-directed residential undergraduate college-degree program. Housed at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies on a 240-bed campus in Silver Spring, Maryland, the National Labor College meets four times a year. Each time it has unionists resident on campus for two week, followed by a six-month interval, all of whom do an impressive amount of earnest course work on a correspondence basis in the interim.

Despite carrying a full work load back home all year long with their unions, and trying to maintain a decent family life, the vast majority of matriculates (average age, 35) successfully complete the program in three or so years, an accomplishment many previously thought not a likely part of their lives this time around. To the great pride of their immediate families and their union employers (and sponsors), nearly 300 Meany Center alumni now boast a Bachelor's Degree in Labor Studies.

One year after the Center college-degree program began I was invited to teach a basic sociology course and another in Industrial Sociology, an honor I have enjoyed for over a quarter century ever since. Quickly impressed with the eagerness in class of my working-class co-learners, I sought and received permission in 1988 to introduce a third elective, a college credit course in Futuristics.

Having first introduced the subject to college students at Drexel University back in1980, I thought I could merely tweak it abit, and adapt the syllabus and readings with little or no problem. How wrong I was! The challenge here proved formidable.

To begin with, unlike my Drexel undergraduates, my union adult co-learners had little or no formal background: Few had read or even knew about Alvin Toffler's best-seller, Future Shock. Few had any familiarity with classic dystopian works like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's 1984.

Even fewer knew any of the utopian literature, even that of the Church, albeit most dimly sensed that much of the ideological conflict that had animated the '60s and '70s entailed profound disagreements about the preferable future(s) and how to get there from here.

To compound this problem, my union co-learners - unlike my Drexel undergrads (who were 15 to 20 years younger on average) - were initially very resistant to the sort of venturesome thinking required in a futures course. Accustomed to a world of harsh realities, frequent disappointments, daily heartache, and defensive cynicism, many were initially reluctant to engage in the "willing suspension of disbelief" that William James identified as a requisite for fresh learning.

Every year since 1988 I have learned from course evaluations and frank feedback from the best of my 25 students alittle bit more about how to do the course better. I now approach the challenge with seven major tools, all of which in combination win over nearly every co-learner.

First, I encourage hope by highlighting historical matters of which they have little or no prior knowledge. To counter the bleak view with which many begin the course, I review the extraordinary progress we have made as a species in extending our life span, raising the level of well-being, and strengthening the infrastructure of governance and civility.
Taking care not to ignore painful gaps in equity and the atrocities that marr the front-page daily, I help my co-learners process their many grievances with run-away capitalism and other mortal threats to the world's well-being. I go on, however, to emphasize my belief that more has been gained than lost in recent centuries, a trendline that I think we have it in our power to extend for time indefinite - provided we find the willpower, creativity, and capacity to care enough about one another.

Second, I review recent well-known successes of major unions in this or that organizing drive or political campaign. I emphasize the long-range planning entailed in such campaigns, and identify such planning as a key component of futuristics. I also discuss how FORTUNE 500 companies and all major branches of Federal. state, and local government make extensive use of futuristics.

I highlight corporate AND labor union successes in introducing new products and services they are familiar with, and in this way, underline the powerful potential of forecasting applied to payoff matters. This establishes the many significant rewards possible from our academic subject, and whets their appetite for bringing this new tool - long-range planning - back to their union sponsor.

(I mention here my success over the years in bringing top union leaders in as panelists at the Annual Meeting of the World Future Society. These power-holders generally earn strong applause from initially skeptical, if not hostile attendees, once the unionists make plain their respect for forecasting as a serious component in running the Labor Movement. I also talk about my occasional consulting with this union or that eager to explore ideas with a professional forecaster).

Third, I refer over and again to the democratic dimension in futuristics, emphasizing thereby their responsibility for becoming major players in helping to decide our future(s). I reject the notion that there is any one future to be predicted, as in the absurdity of the paper's daily horoscope column.

Instead, I work closely with them in explicating probable, possible, preferable, and preventable futures. We assess the strengths and weaknesses of each, but only after first uncovering and weighing the major values underlying each. I rail against non-voters and other demonstrations of apathy. I explore the sources in class consciousness, class rivalry, and power monopolies that undermine participation. I get them to tell of their own voter-registration efforts, their local union meetings to debate policy issues, and many of such Labor efforts to make a difference - and I link all of this to futuristics.

We make the future in the present, I maintain, either through acts of commission or omission, but the responsibility - especially in one of the most advanced democracies the world has ever known - is fundamentally ours!

Fourth, I put special emphasis on mind-boggling matters, the better to get unionists to re-assess their unexamined assumptions and struggle to take an open-mind approach. Futurists, I explain, are not optimists or pessimists so much as they are possibilists. Giving Issac Asimov credit for this thought, I use it to segue to science-fiction notions that challenge much conventional thinking; eg, cyborgs, terra-forming Mars, inter-planetory travel, etc.

Lest my co-learners privately dismiss this as dreamy fiction, I also highlight science fact developments that are almost as fantastic as those dreamt up by Asimov and his creative fellows. We explore biotech "miracles," the prospects where nanotechnology is concerned, the possible impact of wearable computers and personal Intelligent Agents on our lives, and so forth and so on.

Fifth, I explain the tools we have in futuristics for gathering data (Delphi Polls, Expert-Genius Interviews, large-scale polling projects, computer processing of massive data banks, etc.). I also discuss the tools we have for assessing impacts of developments; eg, technology assessment techniques, social indicators research, computer simulations, etc. Special attention is paid to tools we have for evaluating forecasts, and learning from their fate.

Above all, however, I focus on the values inherent in reliance on this tool or than one, and to the transferability of any of the tools to the special forecasting needs of Organized Labor.

Sixth, I take great care in my choice of literature. Trial-and-error have taught me that the books must be engaging, clear, short, and relevant. As well, it helps if they are available in an inexpensive paperback edition.

From the outset I have used a great utopian novel, Ecotopia, by Ernst Callenbach. While written in the mid-1970s, it remains creative and prescient. Better still, it offers a plausible upbeat scenario for America's thorough-going overhaul, a blueprint my co-learners find fresh and challenging.

I also use a recent book, Creating a New Civilization, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Unlike much of Toffler's writing, this thin volume is cogent and compelling. An introductory essay by Newt Gringrich lends something special, given Labor's steadfast opposition to what many think he is about.

I have decided to experiment with using Beyond Humanity, a 1997 paperback by Gregory S. Paul and Earl D. Cox, easily the most mind-stretching book in futuristics I have come across in years. Their forecast of what they call an Extraordinary Future, one predicated on the securement soon of artificial life (far beyond artificial intelligence), very advanced robotics, and nanotechnology impacts, truly takes forecasting where it has seldom if ever gone as well.

I prepare my own chapter-by-chapter true-false open-book take-home quizzes to accompany my texts. Co-learners thank me for this in course evaluations, as it helps me highlight what I want them to focus on, and they take pleasure in getting high scores week after week. Each quiz features two write-in questions that ask what surprised, or pleased, or dismayed, or puzzled you the most in the assigned reading.

Finally, I make a point in closing the course of connecting it to one over-arching possibility that could just make Labor's renewal a better-than-ever prospect. I call this scenario the CyberUnion Prospect, and use it to pull together many strands of the semester's work. A CyberUnion stands out in its employ of futuristics (a perspective), infotech (cutting-edge tools), services (cradle to grave), and traditions (Labor's soul).

Employing futuristics, a CyberUnion will replace the narrow "putting-out-fires" orientation of most unions with a longer perspective, one that encompasses the here-and-now, but extends 5 and 10 years beyond it. It will replace a narrow tolerance for shopworn communication tools (newsletters, mailings, etc.) with a high-tech perspective, one that upgrades familiar tools (as in adding color to the newletter) even as it moves to the cutting-edge (e-mail for all; listserves for many; etc.). It will replace hollow observances of union traditions with whole-hearted celebration, the better to ensure that labor's high tech gains are always accompanied by comparable high touch advances, e.g., a local's history and traditions could be "captured" in a memorable CD-ROM provided to all.

These attributes should help put labor unions on a par with the CyberCorps rapidly coming their way. They should be able to get Americans to think of unions, and not just of corporations, when they think about successful cutting-edge 21st Century organizations. They should send the message that labor is finally and actually "with it!," a message of import for the union's potential and actual membership, the media, the public, and the business community alike. And they should empower the rank-and-file as never before.

This model could invigorate adapters, inspire the membership, favorably impress prospective members, intimidate labor's opponents, intrigue vote-seekers, and in other valuable ways, significantly bolster labor's chances.

Naturally, I have each class do an anonymous evaluation of every aspect of the course, especially the books and the essay assignments that guide their learning over the six month interval between the week-long start of the course and the one wrapup session with which we close it out. I take their assessments quite seriously, so much so that I have no hesitation about considering my adult enrollees as co-learners with me in a joint intellectual (and spiritual) adventure.

An elective course, Futuristics generally gets a full enrollment, and in the hallway scuttlebutt apparently ranks very highly.

The danger to it comes from other quarters: For example, two old straight-laced faculty recommended to the Dean a few years ago that the course be cancelled and squeezed instead into an hour of my Intro to Sociology course (so as to free up elective time for other course offerings). With no involvement on my part, both alumni and current students circulated a "keep-the-course!" petition, and a delegation went into the Dean's Office to rail against this advice. The course continues as since 1988, and I might even someday begin to speak to these two"colleagues" again. Overall, I believe trade unionists are organic "futurists," devoted as they are to grievance-resolution, collective-bargaining, and political influence, each a profound exercise in making the future in the present.

All the more important is their matriculation in a college-level course that surfaces much that they need to know if they are to strengthen their record as future-shapers. I am very pleased to pioneer here, and hope to soon learn of many more such efforts whereever free trade unionism is struggling to help create a world closer to our heart's desire.

*A much shorter version appeared in the American Behaviorial Scientist, November-December, 1998. This version was originally prepared by a book, CyberUnion: Tomorrow's Labor organization, now under preparation.