Just a few hours ago I was on the phone with a staffer from a major international youth organization committed to youth social entrepreneurship.

The staffer and I agreed that we needed many more change agents to address the ills of our peoples and planet. But we quite disagreed on this: he thought that youth would recognize the need for change and come up with ideas, made feasible by adult mentors. I said that, if youth were not being taught to think outside the box, they would not do so.

Neither our middle or high schools or universities are teaching, inspiring, and engaging youth to think and act outside the box. (For example, I get tired of never-ending voter-registration drives whose innovation is to bring a different band onto the stage. All glitz, no blitz.) In my e-mail archive is a telling example which I would hold up to anyone who chose to argue the point. Over a year ago, I communicated with a journalism teacher whose high-school students had won national awards over the years for the excellent school newspaper which they wrote and published. Since in the two issues which I skimmed there was only one passing reference to our community of Montebello, California, I offered to come speak for fifteen minutes once a week about the community. The teacher replied that if the students wanted to write about the community, they would. To which I politely retorted (is that an oxymoron?) that if the students did not know anything about the community, they were not going to write about it.

Maybe the author of A HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY should do A HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO PLANET EARTH? Life is so strangely humorous.

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About the Author

While an attorney by profession, Van is a social entrepreneur by passion. He develops concepts for social ventures and community programs–a delightful challenge–and then looks for collaborating students and faculty–a devilish challenge. Concepts include mass education through online lessons, micro-franchising, the promotion of fuel efficiency, pet care, at-risk teen males, and democratizing American democracy. He is very supportive of youth entrepreneurship, as expressed through Youth Venture, Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship, and Do Something, Van finds a major challenge in the generally irrelevant curriculum-from a community viewpoint-to which millions of high schoolers are subjected throughout the United States. Van received his J.D. from UCLA and his B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles.