With this short essay, I would like to address a problem I have encountered in my professional life while teaching writing in the context of computing.  My concern is that I am often asked to design a curriculum that focuses on teaching students particular technical skills to the near exclusion of critical thinking skills.  I suspect that this curriculum is specifically designed to seamlessly feed students directly into the digital labor market which research and current national and international debate indicate is not a very good one. 

As Stanley Aronowitz's recent study Post Work: The Wages of Cybernation, Andrew Ross' Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice, and Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work suggest, promised dream jobs are scarce.  Most reports on this labor market indicate that it is a harsh environment marked by outsourcing and temporary unemployment.  Work-related injury is common while health care is not. 

In the absence of industry or union regulation, watchdog groups such as Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility have emerged to combat the exploitative nature of the digital labor market.  In turn, I have begun to wonder about the roles of teachers in delivering up the labor.  Are we responsible for perpetuating a bad situation?  And, what can we do to alter it?