Investing in children is the best investment we can make

Posted on November 3, 2011 | 3 Comments

America is the land of opportunity. It was built on the notion that anyone, with hard work and talent, can succeed, regardless of race, class, or sex, and for decades, that opportunity has come alive for many. Generations have embraced the opportunities and built a life that saw their children do better than they had done. Ask anyone, even today amid a grinding recession, and they still fervently believe that with a little hard work, anyone can succeed.

Yet such opportunity has been steadily shrinking for many. As a once young economy matures, upward mobility inevitably slows. Disparities harden. The United States today has less upward mobility than many European countries. The gap between the wealthiest and the poorest grows ever wider, as wealthy parents pay for better education, better health care, better neighborhoods, and even better nutrition than those farther down the economic ladder. And with that widening disparity, opportunities contract for growing numbers of children, particularly those most vulnerable.

As I wrote yesterday, the child poverty rate, at 21%, is hardening inequality. Restoring equal opportunity for children must be the nation’s goal if we are to compete successfully on a global field. As the disparities in wealth and opportunity widen, policies and programs must fill the gap and level the playing field, giving everyone a truly equal shot at the good life.

The policies and programs that help rebuild a true meritocracy must touch all aspects of a child’s life because life’s opportunities spring from a web of influences, from income to education, to health, to families and communities.

Income is one of the most decisive shapers of opportunity in America. A child born into a family struggling in poverty begins life much farther behind the starting line.

Children who grow up in poverty are less likely to do well in school, largely because their families lack the resources to invest in children’s cognitive development—the foundation of education success. These investments range from early care and education programs to music and art lessons. In later years, these investments extend to afterschool programs, extracurricular activities, and, ultimately, higher education.  A recent study finds that poorest families spend almost one-third of what wealthier families spend on enrichment items for their children. As incomes decline amid the recession, this link between income and early investment becomes an ever greater cause for concern.

However, children’s futures do not always turn on money. Good parenting trumps higher income. Increasingly today, however, parents are under stress. When time is stretched thin, when money is tight, when pressures build, good parenting is more difficult. This is particularly true for single parents, who juggle work and childrearing without the help of a spouse. But it is also true for middle-class parents. Parents today commute longer, parental leave benefits are few and far between, and many families face the strain of unstable jobs that pay less and expect more—if they have a job at all. Job loss can lead to more depression and anxiety among parents, which in turn can affect child adjustment and school achievement.

High levels of stress and isolation can also lead to damaging physical abuse or neglect. Children whose parents are facing economic or social stress, who are isolated with few friends or neighbors to call on, who are young or single are more often victims of child abuse and neglect, often as infants, which can cause irreparable physical and emotional harm. Sadly, the rate of child abuse and neglect has been rising during the past several years. Traumatic stress during childhood has a lasting effect on the regions of the brain responsible for emotion regulation, among other harms. Abuse and neglect has also been shown to produce higher incidence of depression, substance abuse, and criminal activity among adults.

Physical and mental health also affects opportunities. A child whose mother abused drugs or alcohol during pregnancy or failed to get vital prenatal care risks important developmental delays. The developing brain is in various “sensitive stages” during pregnancy and the first few years of life. If nutrition is lacking, or substance abuse is ongoing, or other stresses are present, the brain can be indelibly scarred. Once certain circuits in the brain are mature, it is much more difficult to modify them with experience.

Even where a child lives—his or her neighborhood or community—can influence opportunities. Exposure to chronic stress in dangerous neighborhoods is one explanation for the pronounced health disparities by income. Neighborhoods are where schools are located, and schools in low-income neighborhoods tend to underperform those in higher-income neighborhoods, for a host of interrelated reasons, leaving children with fewer tools to effectively compete.

Creating Opportunities, Maximizing Potential

These hurdles to opportunity—so complicated and intertwined—seem at times insurmountable. Yet they are not insurmountable. Biology is not destiny, and environment—especially the family environment—can be changed. Indeed, a recent study finds that family characteristics explain much of the difference in children’s educational outcomes, and changes to parenting practices and home environment can make a real difference. In-home visiting, where a nurse or other professional visits new mothers in vulnerable situations and helps out, has a proven track record in bolstering parenting skills. The Highscope Perry Preschool Project included just 1.5 hours of weekly home visits yet its impacts on children were long-lasting.

Even the supposedly hardwired brain isn’t impervious to the right stimulus. Many functions of the brain, for example, love nothing more than to learn and adapt. Indeed, the areas of the brain that handle high-level cognitive and emotional functions have a long developmental trajectory—in some instances they are not fully formed until the early twenties. Therefore, even if the child gets off to a poor start, exposure to positive experiences can in some instances help to counterbalance the negative.

Likewise, the effects of poverty are not insurmountable. Evidence shows that with additional income, families increase their spending on learning-related items and activities.  For instance, in the New Hope antipoverty experiment, which supplemented family income with a small stipend similar to the EITC, families used the money to enroll children in child care, afterschool activities, and other enrichment programs.

Other research finds that find that a $1,000 increase in family income leads to improved math and reading test scores. Given these findings, two programs should receive continued support. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) both supplement income and help families make ends meet and alleviate the strain of poverty.

Even without raising income, we can alter a child’s path by helping him or her build the skills needed to take advantage of future opportunities. Improving child nutrition, as WIC and other services do, can help children build a foundation for healthy development. Programs that encourage prenatal care and breastfeeding also contribute to healthy development in those critical months and early years.

One of the most important steps to equalize opportunity is to expand quality preschool and afterschool programs. Head Start, Early Head Start, and similar high-quality early childhood programs lead to significant leaps in IQ and cognitive ability among children. Even though the IQ advances level off later, other benefits remain. Children in the Highscope Perry Preschool Project, for example, earned higher test scores at age 10 even thought their IQ scores were not any higher on average. They did better because the program had also focused on those equally important the socio-emotional skills such as perseverance, self-control, motivation, self-esteem, among others. Yet Despite the proven track records of quality preschool and quality early child care on children’s opportunities, high-quality child care is also financially out of reach for too many. A poor single mother would have to spend 45% of her income for full-time child care at a licensed child care center.

These and many other supports have been shown to fill the gap between what the child inherits and what opportunities await. So much happens early in life to, if not cement, then shape the course of our lives that it is short-sighted not to invest during this critical stage when the return will be great. The dividends to both children and society, in other words, accrue for a lifetime.

Not everyone starts from the same gate. Some have farther to run just to cross the starting line. But all children should have the opportunity to run the race.  And with continued support, we can ensure that happens.

Here’s my sources for the above facts:

Jane Waldfogel et al., “Fragile Families and Child Well-Being,” The Future of Children, 20(2)(2010): 87-112.

Greg Duncan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Consequences of Growing Up Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane, Whither Opportunity (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).

The short-term job loss effects are from Ann Huff Stevens and Jessamyn Schaller, “Short-Run Effects of Parental Job Loss on Children’s Academic Achievement.” (Davis, CA: University of California, Davis, 2009).

Christopher Boccanfuso et al.,  “Ten Ways to Promote Educational Achievement and Attainment Beyond the Classroom.” Research to Results Brief 2010-16. New York: Child Trends, July 2010.

Greg Duncan, Aletha Huston, and Thomas Weisner, Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).

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A secure adulthood begins at age 2

Posted on November 2, 2011 | 1 Comment

The inequality of opportunity has been on my mind lately. America, after all, is a land of opportunity, or so they say. I still believe it is, for many. But not all. And here’s why, in a number. 21.5%. One in five. That’s the share of children born in poverty today. The actual number is 6.7 million, the highest number since 1962.

Equality of opportunity is, in short, the definition of social justice. Yet as two indicators profess, we as a country have lost sight of that standard bearer. Our nation’s child poverty rate lands us third from the bottom in a list of 31 developed countries. Only Turkey, Chile, and Mexico have higher child poverty rates than the United States. Our ranking on public spending on early childhood education as a share of gross domestic product ranks us in the bottom one-third. (To be truly sobered, check out this chart by Charles Blow.)

Children in America are the poorest group of citizens on many measures. Poverty and a lack of investment in early childhood have insidious effects on life chances. Children in poverty are more likely to do poorly in school and drop out, have unintended pregnancies early, and earn lower wages. In their mid-twenties, they are less likely to be employed. Poverty’s long reach extends to the next generation. Children born into poverty are more likely to repeat the pattern with their own children than those raised in more economically stable families. That Medicaid—the health insurance program for low-income families—now pays for 40% of births in the United States indicates just how many kids are starting at a severe disadvantage in life. For them, and through no fault of their own other than the bad luck to be born to a struggling family, opportunity is hard to grasp hold of.

Failing to invest in children early in life is simply short-sighted. Such investments pay strong dividends later, in a more educated workforce, healthier families, lower crime, and a more engaged citizenry. The Nobel laureate economist James Heckman finds that investments in children before age 5 are the most cost-effective of all investments. Every dollar invested returns up to $300 over a child’s lifetime through better outcomes in education, health, sociability, economic productivity, and lower crime.

Yet in that we are failing our children. States have historically borne the fiscal responsibility for children after age 5, yet state spending on education and other services has not increased since before 2008. Ironically, prison costs in some states leave even less for early education. And as the federal stimulus money runs its course, it is likely that states will cut even more.  For programs serving children under age 5–the most critical years–the federal government is the main source of funding, and there, too, investments are in jeopardy. If projections hold, less than 8% of the federal budget will support children by the end of the decade. Less. than. 8%. It’s clear where our priorities lie.

If there is a pie to be divided, it behooves states to give the biggest piece to children—our future. Many interests will vie for the smaller pie. Many will bolster their claim for money with evidence that their program or their tax break works. But rarely has research been as definitive as it is on the benefits of early childhood investments.

Tomorrow I’ll write about what we can do to make sure that kids get off on the right foot and have an equal shot at opportunity.  But for now, the plight is simple: invest in the youngest children first.

6.7 million children are entering the race far behind the starting line. In Illinois, where I live, 600,000 children are in poverty. More than 33,000 homeless children were enrolled in Illinois public schools, a 27% increase since 2007-08. We can do better. We must do better.

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Voices beyond Occupy Wall Street: very little sympathy

Posted on October 28, 2011 | 4 Comments

I had two conversations yesterday with 20-somethings, one still in college and one a recent grad who is now working. Both were unsympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Both thought the protests were too fringe, led by people who did not represent them or reflect their values.

In the first chat, a student in his final year of undergraduate work in New York City, was interviewing me about student debt. As we talked, however, I got the impression he wasn’t enthralled with the protesters, or sometimes even his own generation.

Lurking behind the conversation was a sentiment I heard later in the day over a cocktail with a young woman in her first job out of college. She was hesitant to embrace the motley crew on Wall Street–especially on this issue of student debt–because she felt people go into things with their eyes wide open and shame on them if they don’t read the fine print on their loan papers and get themselves into deep hock as a result. We have free will, she pointed out.

A child of immigrants, she believes firmly in the “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Her parents, who came here with nothing and some serious roadblocks ahead of them, nevertheless managed to become quite successful in the embrace of America. If they can do it, so can most people, she thought. She acknowledged that the playing field is not always level, but she countered, the opportunities are there if you have the ambition and drive to make it happen.

Both she and the young man were put off by the privilege they saw at the protests. The protesters, they thought, had the luxury of being there because they could afford not to work. Some had even quit their jobs to go to the park and take part–such recklessness proved both their privilege and their disconnect from the mainstream.

They were both put off by the demands of some protesters to wipe out the debt, to forgive the debt 100%. Both said–and I paraphrase–don’t you think if you have to pay something back, you’ll appreciate it more? There was little sense that debt was burdensome (of course, both had the luxury of parents who paid for their school). Both I think felt that the issue was a back door for freeloaders to not have to pay for their mistakes.

Neither, I think, believes the country is in as dire straits as it is. Both are too young and optimistic to believe that anything dire will happen to them if they just work hard and play by the rules. I hope that’s the case. But I fear it won’t be. The country is at a point where many of our past derelictions of duty are coming home to roost. We’ve failed to keep up our roads and bridges, we don’t invest in R&D, we’ve allowed our schools to wither, we’ve allowed inequality to gallop ahead and with it blocked opportunities for too many, we’ve buried our head in the sand on immigration policy and force the next innovators to leave the country after we’ve educated them, and we’ve replaced a modest safety net with a you’re-on-your-own workforce and social life. All of these problems were once collective problems. We used to rally as a country and find solutions. Now we separate like oil in water to our factions of discontent. As Thomas Friedman said recently, we have to start looking hard at these issues as a collective challenge. If we do, we face a tough decade; if we don’t, we face a  lost century.

If one thing came through loud and clear yesterday in those two conversations, it was the notion of individualism. There wasn’t even a whiff of a sense of duty to the social contract among us all.  A collective responsibility has been so washed clean in their minds that it’s a non-issue, not because they disagree with it, but because it does not register, period.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We are shaped by our surroundings and our moment in history. This generation came of age among the most free-wheeling, libertarian, no-holds-barred capitalism since the 1920s. They also came of age in an era of identity-driven politics: gay rights, women’s rights, black feminist gender rights, forgotten white men’s rights, animal rights, … you name it, the list goes on. So it’s no surprise that individualism and a distaste for “free rides” and slackers resonates so with these two young people. (This history also helps to explain the gentle anarchy that reigns in the Occupy Wall Street protest. How can you find common ground to form a platform when there are so many issues clamoring for attention and a generation who has been raised on free-wheeling individualism?)

We have splintered into increasingly narrow interest bases and as a result have sacrificed the more social view of a life bound together.  That “social contract” doesn’t mean that the slackers get a free ride. But shouldn’t it include a sense that when the weakest link suffers, we all suffer? Whether this generation will agree with that is a question waiting for an answer.

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Engineering vs Liberal Arts: Updated

Posted on October 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

One of the persistently most popular posts on this site is “Engineering versus Liberal Arts.” It seems time then to update it with new information. And a new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) offers just that.

In my prior post, I wrote that if a young person were hoping to make a decent living, science and engineering were good bets. While wages had stalled in other more generalist fields, like liberal arts, wages were holding their own, and even increasing, in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Alas, this demise of the generalist made me a little sad. But what can you do?

Well, that still holds. People in white lab coats who play with material things—the STEM worker broadly speaking—are in a perfect position. They actually have employers who come begging. STEM workers include the usual suspects, like biologists and pharmacists, but they also included skilled manufacturing, architects, and many health care positions. Employers clamor for these professional problem-solvers and often can’t find enough workers, even in this recession. And their jobs prospects are projected to only grow.

These jobs require education, but not as much as many people assume. Three in ten STEM workers have only an associate’s degree or some kind of technical certificate. And they make good money.

“If you’re thinking solely about money,” says Carnevale, an economist and author, with Nicole Smith and Michelle Melton, of the report, “it might be smart to get a STEM associates degree, rather than, say, a BA in education. A STEM degree or certificate is also “a line-jumper,” says Carnevale. “You can pass people on the career highway with a STEM degree.”

Indeed, in many cases, even certificate holders with STEM occupations make more than people with BA. “A certificate in engineering earns more than an associate’s degree in business or a BA in education,” he says.

Even if you’re not working in a STEM field directly but have training in STEM—think a biology major in sales— “you’ll make more than people in that occupation.”  Farming, fishing, teaching, you name it, if you have a STEM degree, you’ll make more than people who don’t have STEM, the report finds.

What STEM brings to the table, Carnevale says, are the skills that employers want: problem-solvers and critical thinkers. If you think about it, engineers are just professional problem-solvers.

While starting salaries are higher in STEM fields, an interesting thing happens along the way, which diverts many STEM grads into other occupations. With a general education such as liberal arts, he says, one gets the education and then, on the job, learns what is needed to advance.

“That’s where you confront and work with technology,” he says. “School leverages your access to jobs, and learning on the job powers your income.” Eventually, you begin to earn more.

With STEM careers, that path is different. Instead of a generalist education, STEM graduates have very specific preparation. That preparation is what leverages access to careers, and the money is pretty good right away.

These slightly different career highways mean that engineers’ earnings, for example, begin to slow in their mid-30s while liberal arts majors begin to catch up—except if STEM workers move on to other higher-paying occupations like management or sales and marketing, which they tend to do in droves.

This line-jumping gets to one reason we have a shortage of STEM workers, Carenevale says. “If you look at the number of people with high math scores in U.S. education and the number who get STEM degrees, it looks like we’re producing enough STEM talent to fill the jobs.” However, something happens between high school and the workforce that sheds STEM workers. Of 100 students who get a BA, only 19 will graduate with a STEM major. Of those, only 10 will go on to work in a STEM field. The bleeding continues. Ten years later, only eight of those ten are still in STEM occupations.

Although we’re producing a good number of STEM graduates, they don’t end up in STEM occupations, and even when they do, they have opportunities that allow them to move from STEM to better-paying jobs. For some, the STEMS jobs don’t satisfy their interests. For others, there is more money to be made elsewhere.

This is neither good not bad. As Carnevale says, choices are good. Employers are bidding for these workers, and therefore they must pay higher wages to get them and make the jobs more attractive. “It’s not an unhappy problem,” he says. Also, if we were to persuade everyone with high math skills to stay in STEM, the rest of the economy would starve for these skills. “We won’t have enough teachers who can teach math, or enough talented people with good analytical skills.”

So the bottom line? In this day and age of increasingly high college costs, it might just serve young people well to focus on a career in math, science, engineering, or technology of some sort. Get a biology degree. You can career-flip later and still earn more than your colleague with a marketing degree. Better yet, get a two-year STEM degree or a specific  certificate, like an engineering certificate, and leverage it on down the road for a different job, with higher pay.

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Average is over

Posted on October 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

It’s Friday, so it must be Psychology Today time. A reporter called earlier in the week asking, What’s up with men today? Why are they so slow to get started on this path to adulthood? Is it internet porn? Bad parenting? She happened to be lying awake at night flummoxed as to why her son can’t seem to get it in gear at age 25. So today’s post over at Psych Today tries to answer that question (spoiler alert: it’s not internet porn). What is it like to get started in life today in an age of anxiety, when globalism and technology have fundamentally altered how we live and work, and yet our education remains stuck in an 18th century model of time clocks, standardized tests, and hierarchies.

It’s  inspired by a talk by Thomas Friedman I attended this week (at 7:15 in the morning no less) and an interview I did with Cathy Davidson on her new book, “Now You See It.”

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“Unjust” is what lit the fire for Occupy Wall Street protesters

Posted on October 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

“The system is deeply unjust and careening out of control,” Naomi Klein, contributor at The Nation, told the protesters holding their ground at Occupy Wall Street in New York. That statement, it seems to me, holds the catalyst for this crowd-sourced protest. Besides having all the elements to rally a crowd, it turns on the word “unjust.” For this youngest generation, “unjust” is the equivalent of “Vietnam” for the Boomers. It’s loaded. It sparks the passion.

In many interviews with young people, their political apathy has always stood out. They don’t read newspapers. They don’t vote. They hate the horse-race politics. They don’t like confrontational debates. But where they are passionate is around causes, and in particular causes that rectify a wrong, that fight injustice. Usually that injustice has been elsewhere–Africa seems to be a favorite. AIDS, poverty, rape, dispossession: these are all topics young people have rallied around (mostly online). Our own two wars or poverty on our shores: not so much. The more abstract, far-away problems with clearly horrible consequences grabbed their attention. It was easy to “like” a cause online or buy a t-shirt or a pair of shoes that “gave back” to a cause.  Local political wrangling? Not interested. “I’m so bad at following politics and the news,” is a common response.

We recently sat down with about 100 young adults  for a wide-ranging interview on how the recession has affected them. (In a word: ouch.) As part of the interviews, we asked them about what they were thinking when they saw Lehman Brothers and the other big banks come crashing down in 2008, or the prospect that capitalism was being sorely tested. Most said something like, “Thank God it doesn’t affect me.” At the time, most were still in college, working on the assumption that it would be all said and done by the time they graduated. Now, two years later and largely unemployed or underemployed, they are perhaps thinking twice about where to cast the blame.

The big fuzzy social justice issues are suddenly becoming much more defined and personal. After all, this youngest generation is hardest hit by the recession. But in this case, social justice is their justice, not a cause in Africa or Tibet. It is the stark inequalities in wealth and assets and the power imbalance that such inequality brings. As Joseph Stiglitz put it, turning Lincoln’s famous phrase on its head: a government for the 1%, by the 1%, and of the 1%. (1% of the country’s population owns one-fourth of the nation’s income and 40% of its wealth today). Young adults are feeling this shift personally. The power imbalance is sucking the life out of their futures.

Sure, their demands are unformed, and the occupation on Wall Street is largely a 21st century love-in still. But they’re out there. For this generation, that’s huge. I cannot say that strongly enough: HUGE. This is a generation that talks the talk a lot about social issues, but doesn’t often walk the walk (either to the voting booth or the picket line). But here they are. Something has changed.

For once perhaps their ignorance of history will benefit them. They don’t feel the pressure to protest in familiar forms of the past. “Anarchy” doesn’t even fit them: not enough anger. They’re coming together on their own terms, in a new form of political protest. The skeptics don’t think this movement has a chance because they cannot articulate their demands. What do they want? But as my husband, who was at the rallies in the 1960s and 1970s said, it wasn’t that organized back then, either. A lot of people joined in for the hash and to pick up girls.

It is up to the legislators and others in power to respond to the protest. The protesters should not have to figure out how to fix the problem; that’s what we have elected officials for. The protesters’ role is to voice the discontent–no matter what that voice looks like. In that, they are doing their job as citizens.

For more on the protests, here’s an “official” site: Occupy Wall Street.
Here’s their newspaper (newspaper!): Occupied Wall Street Journal

Here’s the Facebook page.  Twitter is #occupywallstreet

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A new generation, a new movement underfoot

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Yesterday morning, after many mornings of disheartening news, I awoke  to the headline, “Protests Around the Globe as Faith in the Vote Wanes.” The story reported on young people in Israel, Spain, Greece, India, and elsewhere who have taken to the street to voice their anger at their leaders, at corruption, and at blocked opportunity. Yes, I thought. Start something. Start something now.

What was truly inspiring was the new form of government they are agitating for. With little faith in the ballot box, whose politicians are seen as corrupt and corrupted, pandering to the established interest groups, they are seeking a new answer. As the Times reports:

They are rejecting conventional structures like [political] parties or trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

When we interviewed young people for Not Quite Adults, I distinctly remember Zach, a young 20-something with a bright future ahead. He and many others were electrified by Obama’s run at the time, and yet he said, politics as a whole turned him off. Asked about protests, he said,  ”My generation doesn’t go in for that old form of protest.”  The banner-waving, the bull horns, the fired-up masses: Too confrontational. Too radical.

Although his peers across the globe are still embracing the old-school protest, their ideas about how to govern, how to organize certainly reflect Josh’s ideas. Participatory, fresh, self-organizing, more decentralized and less dependent on a bullhorn or a figurehead leader. They are all leaders. “A beautiful anarchy” one Israeli called it.

The European and Israeli and Indians’ actions may have been sparked by traditional complaints: unemployment, lack of opportunity, corruption, an electorate who does not hear their pleas. But they are acting in new, and hopeful, ways. This younger generation is turning to each other, seeking a new way of governing. The old forms, in this generation’s eyes, are no longer legitimate–any of them. The Left is corrupt, the Right is corrupt–they all pander and work to hold on to power, nothing more.

Their decentralized self-organizing ethos springs from this generation’s life on the Web.  I have the good fortune to manage the online site for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning program so I have the privilege of learning about digital media from people like Mark Surman from Mozilla Foundation and danah boyd at Microsoft, or Katie Salen of the Quest to Learn schools. I’ve seen first-hand how kids operate with digital media, and it is open, free, and most important to this conversation, the “sage on the stage” is dead.

The era of an “expert” deigned as such by a gatekeeper doling out credentials or admittance to the club is fading. And with this  fading comes come a diminishment of the powerful elite. Authority is turned on its head. If you’re good at what you do, and you’re only 15, so what? If you can pass muster among your peers and prove yourself in an open forum, who cares if you’re a 15, or 20, or 60?

Consider publishing. Since at least Boswell and Johnson’s era, authors were designated as such by the intellectual and power elite, whose judgments deigned one talented enough to join the club. Only a select few made the cut.  Unless one was accepted into that clatch, we were forever the reader, rarely the storyteller. That has now changed. Today we have at our fingertips the power to be the storyteller or reporter or columnist.  In 1999, there were 23 blogs on the internet. Today, there are more than 100 million, according to Technorati‘s “State of the Blogosphere” report. The voices of millions are broadcast out through the blogosphere, sometimes garnering only a handful or readers and at other times launching an unknown into the ranks of the blogging elite, with their ideas and opinions and stories reaching across the globe.

Our stories can find new audiences and be “published” in new forms. Consider Electric Literature, for example, where people from all over the world submit their short stories– written, video, or audio. Those stories are then geo-coded (tagged to the location where the story unfolds) and sorted by topic, such that walking to meet a date for brunch in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning, a person can download a love story whose plot unfolds right near the brownstone they are passing.

But the power doesn’t stop at authoring. In fact, as Surman told me one day, the real power lies in the ability to program and write code, which of course the open-source movement is all about making happen.  An art festival in Berlin held a “Facebook resistance” workshop where someone used a simple Firefox add-on (i.e., programming code) to change the ubiquitous “like” button on Facebook to “dislike.” He now has a different power relationship to a big monolith called Facebook. “It gives you choice,” Surman said.

The web lowers the barriers to participation and gives you the tools to direct your course.  Anyone can join an online discussion board and ask a question. More important, and more revolutionary, anyone can provide an answer.

“One thing is certain,” writes Will Richardson in 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn,  …”Instead of learning from others who have the credentials to ‘teach’ in this new networked world, we learn with others whom we seek (and who seek us) on our own and with whom we often share nothing more than a passion for knowing.”

The web makes this connection, this seeking possible, and our connections make “participatory” possible.  As Don Delillo imagined our world, “In the lonely pockets of towns and cities, a thousand minds tick.” Now those thousand minds are networked, and they tick even louder.

For the youngest generation, this participatory ethos is central. After all, the social web was largely built by young people, for young people.  Shawn Fanning and Napster; Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and YouTube—they designed these sites and tools –in their early 20s

I’m a skeptic on most things (read the quote at the top), but I have to say, this movement inspires me. I hope it can take wing, not just in Europe or Syria or India, but here, too.

postscript: While I was writing this blog, a group called Splashlife sent me a link on twitter to the  ”take back Wall St.” movement going on right now. Check it out and join up. On twitter, you can follow it at #takewallstreet or #occupywallstreet.

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