My AARP newsletter’s latest has a headline that by 2010, one in 3 workers will be over 50 and then it talks about the value of the older worker. Who am I to argue?

Still, I would suggest that ageism is so alive and well in the U.S., that by the time companies and employers in general wake up, the infrastructure of all will be severely compromised because, frankly, education of the young has faltered severely. The general wisdom absorbed by the young in the era of WWII, and before, is no longer passed down because their parents didn’t get it either.

I started out shellacking radio tubes in a neighborhood factory during the summers when I was 16. I clerked for a lamp company, typed for a baby photography studio, got my act together (which consisted of buying, finally, some decent clothes) and trying my luck in Chicago’s Loop. I was a steno in an insurance company (pure hell), before lucking into a job with the Chicago Convention Bureau, a real step up. I was finally, a secretary, a title sought after, the top for most young women, not the bottom.

Secretary was a title you achieved, as opposed to stenographer, clerk, gofer, in descending order.

Now “secretary” is something every young girl is called when she goes to work in an office even if her skills qualify her mostly for dishing out big Macs. Young women went to college to get to be a secretary.

I am not saying this is how it should be. Female college graduates deserve every bit the opportunities that the guys have. But one thing did result from this discrimination. The support personnel of companies provided an excellent work ethic and an educated, intelligent application to their duties.

But, rather than return to putting educated women into lowly positions so that companies can be well tended, I suggest that all management trainees start in apprenticeship positions. And there did used to be apprenticeship positions for men. The difference, of course, is that those entry positions led to something better, while the low positions for women led to nothing.

IBM repair men early on showed up in suits and ties. They were college graduates and were on a promotion track. But they had to start by showing up to fix our typewriters. Now new executives for IBM start at the top. No more nuts-and-bolts training so that they can know what they are talking about when making decisions. Leave that to the technical people who never get to be managers.

I worked for 2 years for a large ad agency (a division of McCann-Erickson). Young men fought to be hired by the mail room because that was the apprenticeship position that meant you were going to be groomed. Then one day, this wasn’t true any more. The mail room was no longer the avowed stepping stone. I didn’t have the heart to tell a lowly mail guy with no college, who was enthusing about getting hired, that this program no longer existed. He would always be in the mail room unless he left to start a hot-dog stand.

So the next time you are talking to a company phone person (assuming you get one – there’s always the “press one for …) realize that in order to save on benefits, on training, to attract the brighter college guys who don't want the tedium of starting low, so you start them at the top, you are having to explain everything many times and then wind up getting a dial tone in the middle of your narrative.

Dumbing down is the way of the land. It’s not going to get better because excellence is no longer sought after. The bottom line is the thing and in the short term, a manager who increases the bottom line at the expense of excellence and gets his year-end bonus gets hired away and the damage he did to his former employer shows up slowly but inevitably. It’s called spiraling upward, it rewards incompetents, and it sucks.

xx, Teal