“Learn how to be happy here in the present and even happier when you get out,” he saysover the loud speaker.

Louis Allen, a Durham man who is in prison for the third time, walks in. “At first I was real hesitant
because I thought it was a girl thing. And I didn’t want that family, being away from your friends, the
anxiety of reentering society, the current situation right now in the world with the economy, the joblessness,
all that plays a part in an individual who has a strike against him. So the anxiety tends to build,” said
Wesley Moliere, an inmate who has attended the classes for about three months. “You get a sense of calm and
relaxation through it. And in a situation like this, calm and relaxation doesn’t come easy,” he added.

Dr. Landau says yoga accomplishes something that other prison programs don’t. “The data shows, from other
studies, that simply giving them the skills of reading, writing, arithmetic, air conditioning, GED, does not
improve their recidivism rate. It does not improve the rate at which they come back. But shifting the
personality does,” he said. Landau did a study that shows that inmates who took his yoga class more than four
times had an eight percent chance of returning to prison within two years. The inmates who attended less than
four times had a 25 percent chance of going back to prison. Louis Allen says the class has taught him to think
before he acts. “Once you learn to deal with your mental thoughts and control them better, it’s a lot easier
in life. And as far as going out, I don’t think I’ll have no problem staying out this time,” he said. That is
Dr. Landau’s hope. “To give people the opportunity of changing the mind so that they can exit back into society
as a free person and actually be a free person,” he said.

Large businesses import goods from the other countries in large quantities at a lower price, but the small businesses buy their products locally, which are more expensive. That has impacted small businesses.

The current economic downturn has hurt small businesses in the U.S. and also across the Metroplex.

Southern Methodist University economics professor and author Ravi Batra said that small businesses have been hurt by the higher taxes.

“A small business owner pays 10-15 percent income tax, 8 percent sales tax and 15.6 percent self-employment tax, which represent a large part of small businesses overall income,” Batra said.

Larger businesses import goods in large quantities at lower prices from developing countries than small business can.

“Large businesses import goods from China, India and Africa, where labor costs are lower than in the United States,” Batra said. “They import in a large quantity and try to stock their shelves with almost every conceivable item. That’s because people would like to buy all their consumer goods at one place to save money and time,”

Batra said if the government reduced the self-employment tax on small business owners, it would help them grow. Then, they could invest their savings in their businesses.

“During the recession, many people lost their savings and investments,” Batra said.

“They have less buying power.”

Plano’s Precious Beginning Montessori Academy teacher Uma Srinivasan said the smaller grocery stores are expensive and located far from her home.

“I used to shop in smaller stores, but now I shop in the supermarkets such as Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and Kroger,” Shrinivasan said. “I get almost all the items at the Sprouts cheaper except wheat flour and few kinds of lentils.”

Srinivasan maintains the habit of consuming healthy foods. Many stores like Sprouts, Albertsons, Kroger and Whole Foods have a superior quality of organic products for better prices. These stores also accept consumer coupons, which are a cost effective for the buyers in this recession period.

“Indian and Asian grocery stores are forced to raise their price because of the high export costs, but they do not provide better quality,” Srinivasan said. “The larger stores are competitive with quality and cost.”

Baldev Singh, President of Subji Mandi, an Indian store, started his store in November 2003 in Garland. His store suffered lower sells since last year due to competitive supermarkets.

“When gas prices went up, the prices of imported rice, wheat flours and spices went up,” Singh said. “When value of the dollar goes down his prices go up.”

Singh said the prices of lentils and masoori rice are high because India stopped exporting these goods. He imports these items from Kenya, Australia and Mexico by paying higher prices.

An Indian shopper Gursharan Singh Bagli buys in the Indian store because he finds most of his desired goods in the store.

Ike Theo, a Chinese shopper from Richardson, said he prefers to buy in Fiesta because it is cheaper and he finds most of his groceries in the store.

“Indian stores have no tofu and very less fresh vegetables and fruits available,” Theo said. “I find more varieties of fruits and vegetables in the Fiesta.”

Marc Friedland was the founder and owner of Talley’s Green Grocery, a natural foods store in Charlotte, N.C., from 1991 to 2008. Friedland said he closed his business because big supermarkets opened near his store and he couldn’t compete against them.

Friedland said the failure of small businesses can cause more long-term harm to the economy than the high profile failures in the financial sector.

“In 2007 small businesses accounted for 78.9 percent of all new jobs,” Friedman said.  “But when the recession hit, the government bailed out the banks and large corporations – not small businesses.”

Moreover, with all the federal money being thrown out to businesses “too big to fail,” small businesses have received almost nothing, he said.

“When the small business fails, it is one of the neighbors that get hurt.  Additionally, the employees of that business are out of work,” Friedman said.

Who is Proutist Universal?
Proutist Universal (PU) is a global, non-profit, charitable, education organization of individual members;
local units, affiliated federations and programs; and, service activities. The first program formed by the
organization, a federation in 1959, is the Universal Proutist Student Federation UPSF. PU has career
volunteers and members on every continent, with itsglobalheadquartersin Copenhagen,DenMarc.

Mission Statement of Proutist Universal
The MISSION STATMENT of Proutist Universal is: “To promote and implement PROUT – Progressive Utilization
Theory,  a new socio-economic paradigm. Through educational efforts and materials, social movements and
activities of its various programs, Proutist Universal seeks to ensure the fulfillment of basic-needs-for-all,
 an exploitation-free society, ethical leadership, and the implementation of economic democracy – forthe welfare
and happinessofall.”

Basic necessities guaranteed to all :  People cannot strive towards their highest human aspirations if they
are lacking the basic requirements of life. PROUT believes that access to food, shelter, clothing, education
and medical care are fundamental human rights which must be guaranteed to all.

Balanced economy: Prout advocates regional self-reliance, cooperatively owned and managed business, local
control of large scale key industries, and limits on the individual accumulation of excessive wealth.

Women’s Right: PROUT encourages the struggle against all forms of violence and exploitation used to suppress
women. PROUTs goal is coordinated cooperation, with equal rights between men and women.

Cultural Diversity: In the spirit of universal fellowship PROUT encourages the protection and cultivation of
local culture, language, history and tradition.

PROUT JOURNAL Fall 2009 Issue

Small Business Affected by Current Economic Crisis

Social Entrepreneurs: Transformers of Business and Society

Students Aren’t Customers; Education Is Not a Commodity

Casino Capitalism and Collapse of the American Economy

Share Card – A Bridge from Capitalism to Prout

Prophet of Boom (and Bust)

Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

Bill Drayton, CEO, chair and founder of Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization devoted to developing the profession of social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurs combine street pragmatism with professional skill, visionary insights with pragmatism, and ethical fiber with tactical thrust. They see opportunities where other only see empty buildings, unemployable people and unvalued resources. Radical thinking is what makes social entrepreneurs different from simply “good people.” They make markets work for people, not the other way around, and gain strength from a wide network of alliances…

John Catford, Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World, xv

Size, ownership, and accountability are the main issues. Smaller enterprises, with local roots and equitable ownership of productive assets, combined with democratic regulation are essential for socially just, efficient, and sustainable enterprises.

Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, 296

***

Neoliberal markets and the dominant global business model have failed huge numbers of people worldwide, particularly the 900 million desperately poor who can’t afford to pay market rates for life-sustaining goods and services. The truly indigent lack decent housing. Adequate food and clean water are a luxury. Affordable health care services are all-too-often nowhere to be found, especially in remote rural areas in many parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The deregulated, profit-driven corporate economy and federal governments have also failed to address the breakdown of bridges, levees, and essential public infrastructures while bearing considerable responsibility for rapidly deteriorating ecosystems, accelerating climate-related disasters, and growing social and economic inequalities in highly developed nations, such as the United States, the richest and most powerful nation in human history.

The good news is that social entrepreneurs are giving desperately needy people throughout the world hopeful alternatives to these interlocking crises by boldly developing new and sustainable business models for the 21st century. Social entrepreneurs are creating lasting social and environmental value with their central goal of long-term investment in innovative solutions to pressing social problems for the many rather than the corporate “quick fix” of short-term financial wealth for the few.

With their limited resources social entrepreneurs are skilled at attracting partners and collaborating with others. They are also highly attuned to the needs and values of those being served and the communities in which they operate. Leading social entrepreneurs are changemakers, role models, and mass recruiters who empower local activists to channel their dreams, talents, and passions into concrete and transformative actions.

Social entrepreneurs see the possibilities rather than the problems created by rapid change. They are both visionaries and tough-minded realists committed to practical solutions to serious social problems. They are notable for their unflagging passion and persistence despite great obstacles. They are flexible and unafraid of failure.

Social entrepreneurs are the driving force of civil society which counterbalances the excesses of business and the failures of government to serve the disenfranchised and protect our threatened planet.

As Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton writes: the fundamental challenge for successful social entrepreneurs is to convince potential funders that their basic vision is both important and viable. A critical part of the Ashoka strategy is to encourage for-profit finance firms to enter the social financial services business. The single most important source of these new investment opportunities flows from the business/social “hybrid value-added chain” (HVAC) work.

A good many social entrepreneurs working toward this goal have found powerful leverage in reconnecting business with the newly entrepreneurial/ competitive citizen sector through new value added chains involved in design, production, distribution, servicing, and parallel supports including finance. This competitive dynamic is key to the jujitsu that allows Ashoka, a small force, to set in motion so large and irreversible an historical change.

One area where the HVAC principle is working is with small farmers who don’t have access to drip irrigation equipment (to promote water conservation). The piping and irrigation firms’ costs are too high for the poor rural economy, and the companies don’t understand or trust the small farmers or their environment.

Over the past decade in Mexico, a partnership between Amanco (the leading piping company in Latin America), Ashoka, and local citizen groups who have mastered the relevant skills to help poor rural farmers earn much more, more securely (Drayton, 21-23).

In their important book – The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan see leading social enterprises being built from three innovative business models – the “leveraged nonprofit” (model 1), the “hybrid nonprofit” (model 2), and the “social business” (model 3).

All pursue social or environmental ends that the markets have largely or totally failed to address, and they use different means to do so. They sometimes adopt unique leadership, management, and fund-raising styles, each with its own meaning and lessons for people working in mainstream organizations in the public, private, or civil society sectors.

Leveraged nonprofit enterprises (model 1) deliver public goods to the most economically vulnerable who do not have access to, or are unable to afford, the service provided – such as health, education, safe drinking water, housing, and the like.

An example is Barefoot College, an Indian organization that has had a huge impact on defining and driving what founder Bunker Roy calls the “barefoot” approach to development. Barefoot College was created in 1972 by a group of students from top Indian universities under Roy’s leadership. Based in Tilonia, Rajasthan, it was built around the Ghandian concept of the village as a self-reliant unit.

By applying traditional but informal educational processes to manage, control, and own technologies designed to meet basic needs, the college helps illiterate or semiliterate poor people in rural areas learn to use these technologies without relying on outside paper-qualified experts. All staff at the college take a living wage, not a market wage – and the maximum living wage is $100 a month.

Barefoot College provides abundant evidence of the capacity of ordinary people to identify, analyze, and solve their own problems. It has trained barefoot doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, metal workers, IT specialists, and communicators. Barefoot engineers have solar-electrified the college: indeed, it is still the only fully solar-electrified college in India. Barefoot solar engineers, many of them illiterate women, have solar-electrified thousands of houses in eight Indian states (Elkington & Hartigan, 31-35).

Hybrid nonprofit ventures (model 2) are the most experimental such as a homeless shelter starting businesses to train and employ their residents. Hybrids have the potential to reach new levels of social or environmental value creation. They are able to recover a portion of their costs through the sale of goods and services, in the process often discovering new markets.

Rubicon Programs, founded in 1973, was the first multi-service agency in the United States to link a real job with decent housing and a support system to sustain homeless or otherwise disadvantaged people who are trying to make positive changes in their lives.

Under Rick Aubry’s leadership, Rubicon has incorporated mainstream business principles into its practice and built two highly successful social enterprises: Rubicon Landscape Services, which generates annual revenues of more than $4 million, and Rubicon Bakery, one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s leading bakeries, with annual sales of $2 million. Employees are primarily people with little or no work history who are trying to overcome the challenges of poverty, homelessness, and/or mental health disabilities (ibid., 37-39).

Social business ventures (model 3), particularly in the United States, is the model of choice for most environmental entrepreneurs largely due to the more obvious market opportunities for ecofriendly products and services (see Co-op America’s National Green Pages; www.coopamerica.org).

The entrepreneur sets up the venture as a business with the specific mission to drive transformational social and/or environmental change. Profits are generated, but the principal aim is not to maximize financial returns for shareholders but instead to financially benefit low-income groups and to grow the social venture by reinvestment, enabling it to reach and serve more people.

Currently, the most prominent social businesses tend to be found in the area of microfinance, including Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh (see profiles below), SKS Microfinance and Basix in India, and Accion and Finca in the United States (Drayton, 42-44).

Profiles of Changemakers

Wilford Welch, in his inspiring book – The Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World – identifies successful visionaries who are initiating large-scale improvements in the critical areas described below as well as in “Human Rights and Social Justice” and “The Environment and the Restoration of a Sustainable Planet.”

Health. The Children’s Health Association, which began In Brazil in 1991, has so far reached 20,000 people, breaking a vicious cycle of poor health, poverty, and social exclusion. Founder Dr. Vera Cordeiro, who in 2005 was recognized as “The Most Influential Woman of Brazil in the Health Area,” believes that the greatest systemic treatment is not a particular medicine for a particular illness, but rather a holistic approach to patients’ overall health concerns, employment status and family needs.

Vera has recruited an enormous network of volunteers, physicians, psychologists, teachers and community leaders to offer their expertise in one aspect of the 5-point program of health, housing, income, education and citizenship (Welch, 34).

Education. John Wood, former Microsoft executive, founded Room to Read in 1998 to publish local books, fill libraries, and construct new schools in the Himalayan Mountains. Rooms to Read’s accomplishments include building over 400 schools, self-publishing 250 local language children’s titles, representing over 2 million books, and funding for over 4,000 long-term girls’ scholarships.

Woods is committed to implementing an innovative and expansive growth model that will provide 10 million children in Asia and Africa the enduring opportunity of reading and learning by the year 2020 (ibid., 64-70).

Fair Trade. Priya Haji is the cofounder and CEO of World of Good, a for-profit company that distributes in over 1000 retail stores throughout the United States handcrafted products made by artisans in developing countries. Of World of Good profits, 10 % goes to its nonprofit foundation, which seeks to improve the standard of living of the artisans.

World of Good, which supports 5,680 artisans, with nearly 23,000 dependents and 142 artist groups in 34 countries, has sold over 1 million handicrafts since 2004 (ibid., 107-110).

Disaster Relief and Rehabilitation. Tim Williamson, a former Wall Street stockbroker, in 2002 created The Idea Village, the prominent nonprofit engine for entrepreneurship in the city of New Orleans, developing a database of over 600 local entrepreneurial businesses that collectively employed more than 3,000 people and generated $150 million in revenue.

Now, in the aftermath of Katrina, the Idea Village is helping to rebuild New Orleans, introducing an innovative approach to disaster relief that actively identifies and empowers entrepreneurs as the most fundamental pioneers of reconstruction.

The revitalization plan features the IV Business Relief Fund, the IDEAcorps, which brings together MBA students from Tulane University, community volunteers and professional consultants to assist local entrepreneurs, and the “IV 100” Entrepreneurs, a group of 100 companies, each with less than 50 jobs and $5 million in revenue, that the Idea Village identifies as the most promising entities for growth and expansion. Roughly 95% of the companies it has worked with since Katrina are still in business (ibid.,156-166).

Microcredit and the Grameen Bank

The Grameen Bank, which, along with its founder Muhammad Yunus, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, has been the model that has been copied by hundreds of other organizations around the world. The goal of microcredit institutions is to provide small loans, anywhere from $25 to $400 per loan, to poor individuals who do not qualify for loans from conventional banks requiring collateral.

Microcredit lending to the poor has achieved repayment rates that are nearly perfect all over the world, due to the strong core principles of incentive-based community trust. Women are often the recipients because they repay loans at nearly 100 % and have proven to be more committed to helping their children and general community.

In many rural communities, a borrower will buy a goat or a cow with the start-up loan and then sell the dairy from the animal at market prices, slowly making a profit over time to repay the loan, receive new funds and expand the business.

By 2005, the Grameen Bank had reached 60,000 villages in Bangladesh through microcredit loans while providing financial services to more than 6 millions poor farmers. In total, Grameen Bank had supplied over $5 billion in loans.

Most impressively, within 5 years of their first microloan, over half of the individuals receiving microloans from the Grameen Bank had crossed the poverty line. Today there are over 158 institutions in more than 40 countries utilizing the Grameen Bank microfinance model, which has become a major tool in the struggle to alleviate global poverty.

The World Bank estimates that there are over 7,000 microfinance institutions reducing poverty through microcredit financing worldwide (Welch, 87-88).

BRAC in Bangladesh

Fazle Abed founded BRAC – the former Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee – to fight poverty, illiteracy, and child mortality and to support women’s health and development on a massive scale. His organization mobilizes the latent capacity of the poor to improve their own lives through self-organization.

The full-time staff of BRAC is over 45,000 and has helped 3.8 million poor women establish 100,000 village organizations. BRAC now has over 5 million members in more than 180,000 village organizations across Bangladesh.

BRAC’s health programs are reported to reach some 10 million people. The organization has pioneered oral rehydration therapy (for diarrheal disease), which played a major role in halving the country’s infant mortality rate. Another example of BRAC’s success was when it found that poor women were not profiting from rearing dairy cows, it improved the breed of cow and set up a modern dairy.

BRAC has helped change the global development paradigm from that of helping “needy beneficiaries” to encouraging villagers’, particularly women’s, self-development. This proves that profitable enterprises can be initiated that expand the opportunities for the poor (Elkington & Hartigan, 93-94, 105).

Ashoka – “Everyone a Changemaker”

Ashoka is the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs – men and women with system-changing solutions that address the world’s most urgent social challenges.

Since its founding in 1980, Ashoka, the world’s first and largest social entrepreneurship recruitment and sponsoring organization, has launched and provided key long-term support for more than 1750 leading social entrepreneurs in over 60 countries. It provides these “Ashoka Fellows” start-up stipends, professional services and a powerful global network of top social and business entrepreneurs. It also helps them spread their innovations globally.

Ashoka’s modest investments consistently yield extraordinary returns in every area of human need – from human rights to the environment, from economic development to youth empowerment. Five years after start-up launch, over 90 % of Ashoka Fellows have seen independent institutions replicate their innovations and over 50 % have already changed national policy

(Drayton, 2).

Each of Ashoka 400 leading social entrepreneurs has a powerful, proven, society-wide approach to getting society to do a far better job of helping all children and young people to learn and grow up successfully. Ashoka’s Youth Venture identifies and nurtures school or community youth leaders who recruit and develop Venturer teams and connect with allies and local Partners. Venturers’ initiatives include founding a newspaper, a program to help new immigrant youth, a peer-to-peer counseling service, or building a municipal skateboard park (ibid., 12-17).

Ashoka is also pursuing a new Social Investing Venture (SIV) program. The SIV program seeks out leading entrepreneurs anywhere in the world who are championing major structural change in social finance. It helps them get started and succeed and will work to enable them to share and collaborate with one another, with leading operating social entrepreneurs, and with thought leaders in the social investment field (ibid., 29).

Ashoka’s best estimate is that the citizen sector is halving the gap between its productivity level and that of business every 10 to 12 years… and it is generating jobs two and a half to three times as fast as business.

In 2008 with the global corporate-driven economy failing to meet the challenge of poverty and other worsening social and environmental crises, Ashoka and other social entrepreneurial organizations are successfully responding to the world’s most critical opportunity – multiplying society’s capacity to adapt and change intelligently and constructively and building the necessary underlying collaborative architecture (ibid., 7-9).

Philanthropreneurs

Philanthropreneurs are individuals with great wealth who seek to use their resources in highly entrepreneurial ways. In 1998 Jeff Skoll, the former president of Ebay, established the Skoll Foundation, the largest foundation for social entrepreneurship in the world, and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Oxford University Business School.

Skoll also established Participant Productions, which funds feature films and documentaries that promote social values while being commercially viable.

These films include Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth about global warming; Syriana about petroleum politics; The Kite Runner about life in war-torn Afghanistan; Angels in the Dust, a hopeful film about an AIDS orphanage in South Africa; and Jimmy Carter Man From Plains. Each film is connected to a social action campaign encouraging increased awareness and concrete actions by individuals to address the issues (Welch, 195-196).

***

As we’ve been seeing in the past year with the collapse of the fossil fuel-based energy system and the industrial food system, our most powerful societal sectors – business and government – are unable to effectively resolve these and other worsening crises. As history amply demonstrates, every crisis presents new opportunities. With the new millennium a new “superpower” – civil society led by visionary and innovative social entrepreneurs – has begun restoring and transforming society in a more just and sustainable direction.

Only by building strong, self-sustaining civil society with thriving local communities will people in every country be able to withstand the forces of technological displacement and market globalization that are threatening the livelihoods and survival of much of the human family (Rifkin, 250).

Civil society is a powerful global force and the most important social innovation of the 20th century. It ranks in importance with the invention of the nation state beginning in the 17th century and the creation of the modern market starting in the 18th century (Perlas, 27).

The millennia when only a tiny elite could cause change has come to an end. A generation hence, probably 20 to 30 % of the world’s people, and later 50 to 70 %, will be changemakers and entrepreneurs. That world will be fundamentally different and a far safer, happier, more equal, and more successful place (Drayton, 27).

By only viewing education as a way to a higher-paying job we’re giving a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power.

Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students don’t perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of deskbound administrators and pushy parents.
Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for? At so many of today’s so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today’s collapsing job market.
Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life — 20 years’ service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level — I’m convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It’s simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.)
And here’s one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job — if it’s merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods — you’ve effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.

Three Myths of Higher Ed
Three myths serve to restrict our education to the narrowly utilitarian and practical. The first, particularly pervasive among conservative-minded critics, is that our system of higher education is way too liberal, as well as thoroughly dominated by anti-free-market radicals and refugee Marxists from the 1960s who, like so many Ward Churchills, are indoctrinating our youth in how to hate America.
Nonsense.
Today’s college students are being indoctrinated in the idea that they need to earn “degrees that work” (the official motto of the technically-oriented college where I teach). They’re being taught to measure their self-worth by their post-college paycheck. They’re being urged to be lifelong learners, not because learning is transformative or even enjoyable, but because to “keep current” is to “stay competitive in the global marketplace.” (Never mind that keeping current is hardly a guarantee that your job won’t be outsourced to the lowest bidder.)
And here’s a second, more pervasive myth from the world of technology: technical skills are the key to success as well as life itself, and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide are doomed to lives of misery. From this it necessarily follows that computers are a panacea, that putting the right technology into the classroom and into the hands of students and faculty solves all problems. The keys to success, in other words, are interactive SMART boards, not smart teachers interacting with curious students. Instead, canned lessons are offered with PowerPoint efficiency, and students respond robotically, trying to copy everything on the slides, or clamoring for all presentations to be posted on the local server.
One “bonus” from this approach is that colleges can more easily measure (or “assess,” as they like to say) how many networked classrooms they have, how many on-line classes they teach, even how much money their professors bring in for their institutions. With these and similar metrics in hand, parents and students can be recruited or retained with authoritative-looking data: job placement rates, average starting salaries of graduates, even alumni satisfaction rates (usually best measured when the football team is winning).
A third pervasive myth — one that’s found its way from the military and business worlds into higher education — is: If it’s not quantifiable, it’s not important. With this mindset, the old-fashioned idea that education is about molding character, forming a moral and ethical identity, or even becoming a more self-aware person, heads down the drain. After all, how could you quantify such elusive traits as assessable goals, or showcase such non-measurements in the glossy marketing brochures, glowing press releases, and gushing DVDs that compete to entice prospective students and their anxiety-ridden parents to hand over ever larger sums of money to ensure a lucrative future?

Three Realities of Higher Ed
What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? My guess: plenty. These are the three most immediate realities of a system that fails to challenge, or even critique, authority in any meaningful way. They are bills that are now long overdue thanks, in part, to that system’s technocratic bias and pedagogical shortfalls — thanks, that is, to what we are taught to see and not see, regard and disregard, value and dismiss.
Over the last two decades, higher education, like the housing market, enjoyed its own growth bubble, characterized by rising enrollments, fancier high-tech facilities, and ballooning endowments. Americans invested heavily in these derivative products as part of an educational surge that may prove at least as expensive and one-dimensional as our military surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As usual, the humanities were allowed to wither. Don’t know much about history? Go ahead and authorize waterboarding, even though the U.S. prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II. Don’t know much about geography? Go ahead and send our troops into mountainous Afghanistan, that “graveyard of empires,” and allow them to be swallowed up by the terrain as they fight a seemingly endless war.
Perhaps I’m biased because I teach history, but here’s a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S. history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so.
We don’t have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history — not when they never learned them to begin with.

Donning New Sunglasses
One attitude pervading higher education today is: students are customers who need to be kept happy by service-oriented professors and administrators. That’s a big reason why, at my college at least, the hottest topics debated by the Student Council are not government wars, torture, or bail-outs but a lack of parking and the quality of cafeteria food.
It’s a large claim to make, but as long as we continue to treat students as customers and education as a commodity, our hopes for truly substantive changes in our country’s direction are likely to be dashed. As long as education is driven by technocratic imperatives and the tyranny of the practical, our students will fail to acknowledge that precious goal of Socrates: To know thyself — and so your own limits and those of your country as well.
To know how to get by or get ahead is one thing, but to know yourself is to struggle to recognize your own limitations as well as illusions. Such knowledge is disorienting, even dangerous — kind of like those sunglasses donned by Roddy Piper in the slyly subversive “B” movie They Live (1988). In Piper’s case, they revealed a black-and-white nightmare, a world in which a rapacious alien elite pulls the levers of power while sheep-like humans graze passively, shackled by slogans to conform, consume, watch, marry, and reproduce.
Like those sunglasses, education should help us to see ourselves and our world in fresh, even disturbing, ways. If we were properly educated as a nation, the only torturing going on might be in our own hearts and minds — a struggle against accepting the world as it’s being packaged and sold to us by the pragmatists, the technocrats, and those who think education is nothing but a potential passport to material success.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles focus primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu

The progressive orientation of society is maintained by making continual adjustments in the use of physical
resources and mental potentialities in accordance with spiritual and Neo-humanistic values. Human beings are
encouraged to construct economic and social institutions to facilitate the attainment of our highest
potentialities.

Capitalistic economy is very well acquainted with the categories of buying, selling, cost and profit. In a transitional period where the purchasing capacity is lowering there is another emerging category that we can call use or utilization. Suppose that you do not have the money to buy a non-perishable commodity. What other options do you have? Rent, take a loan, use the credit card, exchange, …. what else? You can borrow on a condition of trust. You use a commodity and you return it in the same state after a period of time. This is relatively something common for public libraries where you can borrow books, CD, videos with a library card on the condition of returning them in good state before a certain time. Can the same concept be extended to other commodities, for example, tools, bikes, jewelry, paintings and musical instruments?

In Iowa City the public library carries not only books, CDs and videos for use and return, but also paintings that can furnish a home for three months and keep rotating among users of the library. In Philadelphia there is a tool library where it is possible to use and return work tools like chain saw, skill saw, etc. In some countries of Europe bikes can be used and returned free of charge at the train station. There is nothing new in the concept of borrowing and returning. What can be innovative is to have a membership card that allows to use multiple commodities in different locations and potentially in any country.

We are used to debit, credit and discount merchant cards. Can we envision a “share card” that is only for the use of commodities without having to purchase anything besides a membership? It means that with a yearly fee of $50, for example, you are allowed to borrow, wear and return jewelry worth of thousands of dollars if purchased. It seems incredible but jewelry is actually one of the most durable commodities. Thus, it can be used by multiple people by rotation on a condition of trust.

Renting and sharing are two different categories. In renting no membership condition is required. In sharing, membership is essential. For example, several companies are offering car renting opportunities and also a whole new sector of economy is developing as car sharing. The main difference between renting and sharing is the mind set. In renting you are still a consumer with no interest in maintaining the good state of the commodities besides the penalties you might incur. In sharing there is a cooperative use recognized in the form of membership and potentially rewarded within the same frame.

Envisioning the share card as a economic way to use commodities at large we may consider that producers might recover an interest towards the durability of their goods. They can develop lines of products only for use and not for sale, with higher quality standards. The “use and throw” mentality may get gradually replaced by a more conscious “use and share” way of life. Prout, the Progressive Utilization Theory, in its fifth principle, states, “The method of utilization should vary according to time, place and person, and the utilization should be of a progressive nature.”

Is the “share card” a bridge from Capitalism to a Proutist Society?